A Love Beyond Time
by Gabriel Ice
Summary: Until the end of time, until death do you part, will you still love her? Will she still love you?
1. Prologue

Moonlight mingled with chimes from Nadia's Bell high above Leene Square. Below, a chanting festive chorus and countless strings of blue-green parade lights threatened to drown both out. Costumed dancers strode the circumference of the square, and in the middle sat a silent and still crowd, awed by the spectacle and respectful of the occasion. The atmosphere at Princess Nadia's wedding lingered around the golden mean between gravely solemn and ritually joyous.

Nadia herself stood atop a platform at the north end of the square. She required every ounce of self-control to keep her eyes from straying down the aisle in anticipation of the telltale spiky hair that would herald the arrival of the groom. Her role, as per standard royal wedding protocol, required her to face east, only seeing her beloved when he at last alighted next to her on the platform. The narrow focus of her vision during the first part of the ceremony stood for her unwavering love and devotion for the future king and had been a staple of every wedding in the Guardia family for centuries, and if Nadia's ancestors had the strength to endure such a restrictive rubric for the sake of the ceremonial atmosphere, then she could, as well.

The chorus fell silent as the minister – the royal Chancellor himself – rose from a chair at the side and took to the podium at center stage. He began uttering a few historic words about marriage and about the future of the kingdom and about the glories of the past, and as he did, Nadia felt herself relaxing and settling into the moment. This scene was a part of Guardian history, and she was a part of the scene. Even the natural and artificial lights reflecting off her dress in a kaleidoscope of blues and greens marked her as nearly an object in the ethereal scenery.

A lapse in concentration led to a quick glance at the crowd. In the front sat some of those she loved most, including King Guardia XXXIII and his queen, Taban, Lara, and Lucca Ashtear, and, of course, her friends from the castle. All wore stoic expressions save Lucca, who, clad in a formal dress with done up hair and makeup streaked by half an hour's tears of happiness, hardly looked like herself. A few companions from the campaign to destroy Lavos dotted the landscape, but most of the rest of the crowd comprised Nadia's relatives, their families, and a few historians and reporters along for the thrill of seeing history unfold in person.

The Chancellor finished his speech, and Leene's Bell tolled in a mighty rhythm as two new figures began a steady march down from the very end of the aisle towards where Nadia stood. The one on the right was a middle-aged woman with a happy expression on her face and clothes that looked like they had been recently tailored. On her arm walked a young man with wild hair and a heart dedicated to his new bride.

Someone began beating an enormous kettle drum. The rhythm signified the inevitable march of time, the changing of the rule of the kingdom from the old generation to the new, and the relentless thumping of the organic heart of the land, the Guardia Dynasty. Their rule, now Nadia's, meant peace and prosperity, a fair system of laws instead of tyrants, and the highest standard of living in the world. Or so the Chancellor announced.

By the time Chrono reached the platform and took Nadia's hands in his own, the soon-to-be Queen could already feel her pulse racing to keep up with the drumbeat. She felt as close to Chrono as at any time since they met atop Death Peak. Thinking of that time, and seeing his face, she felt deep down that she could never lose him again, never let him go, and never forsake him. Even death could not part them, though on two occasions it had tried. What was left after that? Nadia would love Chrono until the end of time.

"…Until the end of time, until death do you part," spoke the Chancellor.

"I do," said Nadia.

"And you…" began the Chancellor, but Nadia's attention fell squarely on the groom's face, not his vows.

And Chrono nearly answered, but someone cut him off.

Lucca.

Her cry cut through the night. It stunned the Chancellor. It shook the audience out of their trance. It mangled the drummer's concentration and rhythm.

It was a reaction to something else she saw, as Nadia noticed when she turned in the direction Lucca was pointing.

Behind the stage, partially drowned out by the celebratory lighting fixtures, hovered a glowing orb roughly the size of a melon. Nearly as soon as she saw it, the orb began to expand, and within the span of a second, it became the largest Time Gate Nadia had ever seen.

Lucca was no longer the only one screaming. Nadia joined in when she saw Chrono floating into the Gate, upside down. Reflexively, she lunged in Chrono's direction, but he was too high above the ground to be caught. And with a cry, a desperate cry, of "I do!", he was gone.


	2. Disenchantment

Chapter 1 -- Disenchantment

"Chrono! Wake up, Chrono!"

A girl's voice floated out of the blackness. With it came a ghostly figure, a young maiden, a strange sight,

Lighting the way as she comes out   
A face so fair, and hair about  
As silver as a cloud or near  
Though she's a shade, one need not fear  
An orchid musk upon her sleeves  
A dress that flows like lotus leaves  
A sterling moon rests in her cheek  
Her tresses fine an halcyon-sleek  
Her movement causing her to bend  
Like a leaf in waltzing wind  
And on her head a cap of pearl  
A fitting top for such a girl  
A half-incipient look of pique  
Announces when she wills to speak  
Shining, shimmering, rare complexion  
Icy pure, yet warm perfection  
Marvelous, her glittering dress  
Where art lends grace to sumptuousness  
Flower-like, a stately glow  
Like hardy blossoms in the snow  
Her eyes burn like a mournful wake  
While sunset sneaks upon the lake  
A heavenly concert just ended, it seems  
Or is this girl but a lovely dream?

"Are you... a ghost?" Chrono asked.

"You might call me that," answered the girl, "but I would rather you call me by my name. I am the fairy Disenchantment."

"A pleasure to meet you," said Chrono. "At least, I hope it is. Would you mind telling me where I am and how you know my name?"

Disenchantment replied, "You came through that Gate from the Realm of the Living, did you not? I saw you before you left your world."

"Realm of the Living?" Chrono pinched himself. "Does that make this place...?"

"The Realm of Separation," said Disenchantment. "All souls wind up here eventually, at the Sea of Sorrows, beyond the End of Time."

"Did I die?"

Disenchantment folded her hands. "I must say that I do not know."

"You said you just saw me, though. Couldn't you tell?"

"That sort of thing is not as obvious a distinction as you seem to think. All I know is that you are here."

"Beyond the End of Time, in the Sea of Sorrows."

"Brought here for a purpose." Disenchantment looked into Chrono's eyes.

Those eyes narrowed. "A purpose?"

"Hold out your left hand," instructed Disenchantment.

"Like this?" Chrono did as he was told.

"Perfect," said Disenchantment. "I am to bring you with me on a journey."

"To where?"

"To the Castle of Dreams, on the Orchid Mountain."

"What for?"

"You are to meet with the Princess of the Dead."

"Sounds inviting."

"Have you someplace else to go?"

"That Gate interrupted my wedding." Chrono scowled.

"But you cannot go back now, can you?" Disenchantment gave Chrono a thoroughly disconcerting wink.

"I can't yet, but here has to be a way," said Chrono. "I can't just up and leave Nadia. Not forever."

"I know of no one who has gone back, ever."

"Then I'll be the first," said Chrono.

"Brave one, you are," Disenchantment. Her eyes turned to a shining speck on Chrono's hand. "And you have such a pretty red rock on you."

_Nadia's ring?_

Disenchantment stared intently at Chrono's treasure. "Mind if I have a look?"

"I'd rather keep that to myself," said Chrono.

"Too late!" Disenchantment folded her arms across her chest, chanted to herself, and nodded her head, and with a flash of red light, the wedding band, with its stone, vanished from Chrono's ring finger and reappeared on Disenchantment's. She laughed.

"It's nice," she said.

"Give it back!" said Chrono, his face flushed.

"In time, Chrono."

"In time? I want it now."

"'Now' is a meaningless word in the Sea of Sorrows," said Disenchantment. "An illusion. What you call 'now' exists only in the Realm of the Living and ends at the End of Time."

"Cut the semantics and give me Nadia's ring!" Chrono attempted to lunge at Disenchantment, but his feet met no traction on the mysterious surface of the Sea, and with a plop, he tumbled onto his face, farther away from his target than before.

"It will take you time to become accustomed to moving around here," Disenchantment said through a giggle.

"But you said time was an illusion here!" Chrono grew impatient.

"Real and not-real are like life and death; even I have difficulty telling them apart in this world."

"Fun place," said Chrono as he tried to pull himself to his feet.

"Take my hand," said Disenchantment. "From here on, I shall be your guide."


	3. Jinling

Chapter 2 – Jinling

A.D. 2300

"What is time?" Professor Balthasar asked his class.

Miss Ashtear and Miss Lan raised their hands.

"Miss Lan may answer this," said the Professor.

"Time is an extension of space into four dimensions. We sometimes call it _spacetime_."

"That's the right track," said Professor Balthasar, "but it's not exactly correct. Would Miss Ashtear like to try her luck?"

"Indeed I would," said Miss Ashtear. "I read the book. The nature of time itself is not well understood, but we can say a few things about it when we model it, with space, as a four dimensional manifold carrying with it a Lorenz metric, which satisfies the Field Equations."

"Good, Miss Ashtear," said the Professor. "Now, what does that have to do with gravity?"

"Gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of the Lorenz metric."

Miss Lan pouted. "I knew that, you know."

"You will speak when called upon, Miss Jinling," said Professor Balthasar. "You had your chance."

Miss Lan bowed her head. Her hair slipped in front of her face, masking her shame.

"As for the rest of you, everything Miss Ashtear said is, indeed, in the textbook. I assure you it's an interesting read. After all, I wrote it. I would know. I just hope you agree with me, if you wish to pass the exam."

A few students groaned. A few others opened their book bags and put their copies of _Temporal Mathematics_, 12th Ed., on their desktops.

"Next class's reading is on the nature of Nu. Does anyone here happen to have read ahead? I'm interested. The subject still fascinates me."

Two hands went up again.

"Miss Ashtear?"

XXX

A.D. 2200

"Lucca?"

"Nu is what you called the blue guys we ran into throughout the time stream, isn't it?"

"It is," said Balthasar, "but there's more to the concept than that."

"There is?" Lucca looked puzzled. "Maybe I shouldn't be too surprised. Those guys always creeped me out a little."

Balthasar chuckled. "They'll do that because they are, in the end, related to the essence of everything."

"No kidding?" said Lucca. "That's what you said in your journal, isn't it?"

"My journal?"

"Back in… Oh, you didn't know I read that, did you?"

Balthasar blushed. "You found my secret rooms in Zeal, didn't you? Clever girl."

"It wasn't that hard," said Lucca.

"I'm disappointed, then. If you're right, then dozens of people probably broke in and snooped around through the years. That creeps _me _out!"

It was Lucca's turn to chuckle. "Nice, old man. What about Nu, though?"

"Nu," said Balthasar. "The beginning and the end. It's actually just part of the equation."

"Part? You said everything began and ended with just Nu."

"That was my belief back then, but I have since learned more."

"Do tell," said Lucca. "Nu is only part of it, and?"

"Calabi is the other half. I don't suppose you ran into any of them?"

"Not that I can remember."

"Of course you didn't. They're only theoretical, but they're important. They're important to the structure of matter."

"Why is that?"

"Remember my book?"

"Which one?"  
"_Temporal Mathematics_."

"How could I forget? That's your masterpiece."

"Then how did you forget about Calabi?"

"I… oh!" Lucca almost jumped out of her seat.

"You get it now, Lucca. Calabi-Nu manifolds."

"Yes, of course. What about them, though?"

"Aren't you at all curious why I named them the way I did?"

"Come to think of it, I glossed over that when I read the book. Why did you?"

"This is something I haven't yet published, but I'm sure of it. Remember, if we model spacetime with a traditional four-dimensional manifold, we get results we want from Relativity, right?"

"Right. And if we add the six-dimensional Calabi-Nu manifold, we can say a lot about the observable dynamics of quantum field theory."

"Correct. But reconciling everything is problematic. At least, it was until now."

"Really? You've… you've come up with a unified field theory?"

"I'm on track to get one." Balthasar clapped his hands together in triumph. "See, if we assume that the Calabi-Nu manifolds, or varieties, exist in three complex dimensions…"

"Ooh, I remember my complex analysis."

"Yes, we might have room to talk about two completely separate realms of timeless creatures. The Nu come from one, and the Calabi come from the other."

"Does this have anything to do with the mirror symmetry of the Betti numbers?"

"Hodge numbers. And I'm still working on all of this. All I know is I'm getting very close to being able to build something incredible. Something beyond my wildest dreams. Something you've seen before."

Lucca stroked her chin for a moment before blurting out, "A time machine!"

XXX

A.D. 2300

Professor Balthasar addressed his class one final time before dismissal.

"I want you all to think about what we discussed today. The geometry of time is a complex subject in many senses, but are our current models complete? I mean _complete_ in the non-mathematical sense, not the analytic sense. Could there be anything beyond the Calabi-Nu model? These are open research questions. I want you all to consider what you've learned, and I want you to become the next generation of temporal scientists. I want you to explore new frontiers. I want all this, and I also want… some lunch. Class dismissed."

The Professor abruptly stalked out the door, leaving his class murmuring. Most of the students merely shook their heads at what they heard, passing all the romantic notions off as the ravings of an old man, well past his prime. Two, however, were eager to continue thinking about the subject on the way to lunch.

"Sam!" said the first, Lan Jinling. "You want to have lunch together?"

Samsara Ashtear replied, "I would very much, thanks. Where?"

"The usual. And I want to talk about today's lecture."

"That's good to hear. With Balthasar so old and ill, it's hard to find anyone interested enough to talk about his work. Outside of class, anyway."

Jinling giggled. "I'm always here for ya, you know."

"I know," said Samsara. "That's a friend for you."

"Friends, yes," said Jinling. "Friends with dreams."

"Dreams?" Samsara gave a quizzical look.

"Talk as we walk," said Jinling. "I'm famished."

"Fine, but what dreams?"

"Dreams of surpassing Balthasar."

"That's my dream! You can't take up my family's mantle."

"The Ashtears can be the scientists, but I want to be an engineer," said Jinling. "Or an explorer. Once I make my breakthrough, I want to build a ship that can travel places even Balthasar's Epoch couldn't reach."

"Lofty, indeed," said Samsara. "I don't even think Mother got that far."

"She and Balthasar came awfully close to something big. Heck, they might even have found something. I always got the idea that they weren't telling us everything. Like they were holding back some discovery that was too frightening to reveal."

Samsara smirked. "She was an arrogant hothead, Mother."

"She had a good heart, though. Taking in those orphans."

"Yeah, but why was she in such a hurry to ship me off and settle down?"

"Obviously, she wanted you to get a better education than you would have gotten in the 11th century."

"Obviously," said Samsara. "Still, she always seemed a little afraid of something, like a giant clawed had was going to pop out of nowhere and snatch her away, never to be seen again. She had to be the most nervous person I had ever met. I think some of that rubbed off on me."

"Some tofurkey will calm you down, I think."

"Eww, they're serving tofurkey again?"

"Importing real birds is expensive. You know how much tuition would be if we had every meal shipped up from the planet?"

"Still, eww."

XXX

Beyond Time

Dripping. Dipping. Then a rush, then a flow, and then a pouring. Chrono drifted behind Disenchantment, feeling like a log on a river, speeding up on the approach to a waterfall. Even the sky looked liquidy. Inky black, red waves, violet ripples. Below, the Sea sloshed around as if in an agitator. Everything looked the same in all four directions.

"Disenchantment?" Chrono asked.

"Yes?" she replied.

"Where are we going?"

"I already told you. Hang on now! Bumpy spot."

Disenchantment's worlds seemed to summon an even rougher patch of timeless ocean. Chrono felt himself swept away by his fairy guide, faster and faster. His feet left the surface of the Sea, and he felt as if he were floating. Then falling. Disenchantment held fast, but she, too, began a descent into a blackness where, suddenly, there was no Sea.

"This is our first stop on the way to the Castle," said Disenchantment.

"Stop? We're going to stop?" Chrono asked hopefully.

"Not for a few minutes," said Disenchantment, "but we are nearing a place of relatively safer passage."

"Relatively?"

"A storm brews. We must seek shelter."

"Storms out here? This place is…"

"This place is my home and, now, it is yours. Do not speak ill of it."

Chrono winced. A windlike noise filled his ears as he and Disenchantment continued their downward journey. After what seemed to Chrono like an hour, they landed softly on a wet, mossy rock. Behind them, the Sea sat at an impossibly steep angle, like the foot of a watery hill. Chrono tried not to think about it.

"Ahead of us," said Disenchantment, "is where we shall now travel. This is your first real landmark since you have arrived in this place. Treasure it."

"Where are we?" Chrono let go of Disenchantment's hand and sat down on the stone floor, panting.

Disenchantment's dangerous smile crossed her face. "We have come to Jinling Caverns."


	4. Passion and Pain, Part I

Chapter 3 – Passion and Pain, Part I

A.D. 2300

Lan Jinling sat on the rug in the middle of the floor in her dorm at Bathasar University, twiddling her thumbs and fiddling with her homework set. She found the work almost trivially easy. Easy enough to bore her, anyway, and she didn't have to put in much effort to stay at the top of her class. With Samsara Ashtear, of course.

Samsara was out at the library at the moment, so Jinling had the room all to herself. No one to talk to. Jinling stretched out on the floor, resting her head against the tasseled fringes of her rug. She ran her fingers down the length of one, taking the time to feel each strand of material. She counted six of them all together.

An idea took shape in Jinling's head. It came all of a sudden, and it caused her to try to jump to her feet. She tried to, but she hit her head on the wooden floorboards beyond the edge of the rug. _Ouch_, she thought.

Not one to be daunted, she reached up to her bed, pulled a pillow down to the floor with her, and resolved to do her thinking right where she was. Thinking about Balthasar's lecture.

_Samsara will like this._

XXX

Beyond Time

Stalactites hung from the mouth of the cave in front of him like canine teeth, giving Chrono pause. He could only hope that, when he entered Jinling Caverns, the darkness would only swallow him _metaphorically_ and that only the darkness would be swallowing him. The only sounds he could hear came from the Sea of Sorrows behind him, but he could not bring himself to trust either his senses or his reason until he had better experience with the new land. Though his senses didn't warn him of any immediate danger, he still felt nervous.

Something was alive, he could tell. _Alive_ might not be the right word for something in the Realm of Separation, but it was as good a word as any for describing the moss all over the stone floor. If it could survive, then perhaps something else, something more carnivorous, could as well. Disenchantment had described Jinling Caverns as relatively safe, but she hadn't said relative to what.

"I sense that you are afraid, Chrono," Disenchantment told him.

"And why wouldn't I be?" Chrono glared and tapped his foot on the ground.

"Were I you, I would be, as well," said Disenchantment.

Disenchantment began walking toward the entrance to the cave. When Chrono did not follow her, she beckoned to him. He followed, tentatively at first, but faster when his land legs returned to him.

"Dark in there, isn't it?" he said to Disenchantment.

"Just a bit," she replied. "Just a bit. But lo and behold!"

Disenchantment stretched her arms in front of her, chanted something Chrono could not hear, and waved her hands. In front of her, an orb of what looked like blue fire materialized and floated over her head. The fire illuminated the area nicely, light reflecting off some of the cavern walls and passing through some others. The light enticed several of the rocks to emit a pulsating glow.

"Nice," said Chrono. "How many other tricks you got?"

"More than a few," said Disenchantment. She then continued walking deeper into the caves, without saying another word.

Chrono kept minimal distance between himself and Disenchantment in order to stay near the light, but he had considerable leeway. He could actually see a few hundred feet with little trouble. Still, he felt it better to play it safe and not risk overlooking some dark alcove that could easily hide an ambush party. He'd been spelunking a few too many times to discount that possibility.

Jinling Caverns turned out to be anything but linear. Chrono lost track of how many turns he and Disenchantment made. After a while, he doubted if he could even find his way out. Their path could not be defined by any simple rule. Sometimes it would slope downward, sometimes it would angle up, sometimes it would veer left, and sometimes it would turn right. More than once, it broke into a disorienting spiral. Also more than once, Chrono worried quite sincerely that Disenchantment herself didn't know quite where to go.

Finally, he worked up the courage to ask. "You do know the way, don't you?"

Disenchantment's reply did nothing to ease Chrono's spirits. "I have some idea, and that is better than nothing. Why do you ask?"

"I've lost track of where we are. If you don't know the way out, what happens if we get lost?"

"Do no fear, young Chrono," said Disenchantment. "I said I would be your guide, and I do not intend to get us lost."

"You just said you didn't know the way, though," said Chrono. "Do you know how to get back?"

"Not off the top of my head," said Disenchantment.

"Then we're lost!" Chrono's temper flared up.

"Trust me, please," said Disenchantment. She then turned her back on Chrono, effectively ending the discussion.

Chrono growled under his breath. _Some guide._

Their trip continued in similar fashion for another half hour before Disenchantment finally spoke again.

"Do you see that, Chrono?"

"See what?"

"You do not, then. Look to our right."

Chrono looked as hard as he could, but all he could make out was the same shiny blue rock he had seen since entering Jinling Caverns. Nothing stood out.

"Move forward a few steps," said Disenchantment. "Then you will see what I see."

Chrono tried that, and he still saw nothing.

Disenchantment turned around to face Chrono. Her face turned fierce, and she stared directly into Chrono's eyes.

"Chrono," she said, her voice a subdued hiss. "Three right, two left. Remember."

"What?" Chrono took three steps to his right, turned to look where Disenchantment had indicated, and still saw nothing. He heard something, though. He heard a loud crack, and he felt something strike him on the back of the head.

He then saw stars, which faded into a surprisingly comfortable dream.


	5. Passion and Pain, Part II

Chapter 4 – Passion and Pain, Part II

_A moon rising in splendor  
Is the beauty of my lovely one  
Ah, the delicate yielding!  
Heart's pain torments me_

-Chinese Book of Songs #143

Chrono felt something on his forehead. He expected a headache, but instead, he got a gentle caress, soft as a breeze and even more peaceful. It felt like a set of fingers.

Nadia's fingers. He opened his eyes to see her bending over him, smiling from ear to ear, and giving him the same loving gaze she always gave when he was hurt.

"It's daylight, Chrono," said whispered to him. "Listen to Nadia's Bell."

"I hear nothing," Chrono managed. He closed his eyes again.

"The eastern sky glows," said Nadia. "Dawn is upon us."

"That is just moonlight, dear," said Chrono. "Let it be."

"Quickly, Chrono, you must go!"

"I mustn't," said Chrono. "I mustn't."

"You must," said Nadia. "To share a dream with you is sweet, indeed."

"I must…"

"Go."

XXX

Chrono woke to find he was alone. No Nadia. No one. Not even Disenchantment. No light, even.

He sat for a while on the cold floor of what he judged was still Jinling Caverns, listening. Hoping to hear something—anything. And for a while, all he could make out was his own breathing, which was louder than it normally would have been.

He tried shutting his eyes to go back to his dream of Nadia, but that didn't work. A painful lump on the back of his head prevented him from getting comfortable.

_Where did that come from?_

Chrono replayed his trip through the caves as best he could, but he just made himself bored again. He couldn't quite recall what happened before he blacked out. Something had to have hit him on the back of the head, but what? Was it what Disenchantment saw?

Or was it Disenchantment?

_Nadia would never hit me,_ Chrono mused. _Not from behind, anyway. She only hit me from the front, and then only when I deserved it. Not like Lucca, that rat._

That thought forced a small bit of warm feeling back into Chrono. He almost laughed. In fact, he actually _heard _a laugh.

_Was that me?_

"No," said someone else.

Out of nowhere, a soft, red light filled the area, which Chrono could now see was a small cell at a dead end in the caverns.

"At least, we hope you're not laughing," said the someone else again. "You're not in a position to be very happy. We made sure of that." The voice was lower and more crackly than Disenchantment's. It was also more masculine.

"Who are you?" said Chrono.

"We are here," said the voice again. "What, you want us to show ourselves?"

"If you don't mind," said Chrono.

"Cheeky one, but okay."

A snowy white outline of some sort of gremlin traced itself in front of Chrono. The fuller form of a yellow-skinned—scaled?—demon melted into existence where the outline had been, and it finally solidified into something tangible. It stood slightly shorter than Chrono, it was bipedal, and it had two wings on its back and a tuft of darker orange hair on top of its head, which it scratched with nasty-looking claws. Chrono could not tell if its eyes were pure red or simply black, reflecting the red light.

"We are here," said the creature.

Chrono's first reaction was to reach for his sword, but that did him no good, as he hadn't brought a sword with him to his wedding or to this other world. Feeling defenseless, he backed away.

"Is the human scared of us?" asked the creature. It licked its lips, or at least it licked where its lips would be if it had any.

"Not at all," Chrono lied.

"The human should fear us. All humans do, whether they know it or not."

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most humans have never heard of you," said Chrono.

"Feisty again!" said the demon. "We like feisty. Tasty, feisty. Feisty, tasty. Yum. But not now, human. We will not eat you. No, we were not told to eat you. We just want to leave you hear."

"Leave me here?"

"We brought you here, didn't we?"

"What's with all the 'we' stuff, anyway?" Chrono felt a little bolder now that he decided his foe was not exactly a mental giant.

"We, because we are more than one."

"I only see one of you."

"Your eyes are worthless, are they not?" As if to emphasize the point, the demon blinked twice, causing pools of flame to well up in the middle of each. Its eyes looked as if they could swallow a man whole.

"They're good enough," said Chrono. _At least I don't have Lucca's eyes. What's her prescription, anyway?_

"The human thinks we are playing tricks with it, does it?" said the demon. "That is not our job, now. Our job is to maintain order."

Chrono snorted. "You maintain order by knocking me out and separating me from my guide?"

"If that's what we are told to do, yes," said the demon. "We only follow orders."

"Who would order me beaten?" Chrono asked. "Anyone I know?"

"It wasn't the human's fairy guide, if that is what the human thinks," said the demon. "Delicious fairy. Tasty fairy, but not bossy fairy. No, we have no reason to tell a human of our boss."

"You hurt Disenchantment?" Chrono again reached for his sword, and again he found that it wasn't there.

"Silly human. Tasty human. We must leave. We mustn't answer more questions. We must stick to what we do. There are more to eat, there are."

Chrono stood still, mouth agape. He watched as the demon disappeared from sight. He just about fell over when he saw the image that faded in when it was gone.

"Nadia!" Chrono shouted. "You have Nadia?"

"Silly human," said the demon's voice. "Humans never learn, whether from Pain or from Passion, do they? Despite all we do to teach them, they never learn."

Chrono lunged at the image of Nadia, but she faded from sight as his arms reached her, and Chrono tumbled forward onto the rock floor.

"Who is Nadia, anyway?" the demon taunted, its voice fading. The red light disappeared with it.

"What do you mean, 'who is Nadia?'" Chrono yelled. "If you didn't know, how could you show her to me?"

No one answered.

"Hey, ugly! I'm talking to you! Pain? Passion? What is your name?"

Chrono pounded the floor out of frustration. To his great surprise, he actually received an answer. It was not a verbal answer. It was something he saw. The floor where Chrono had hit his hand began to glow blue, just like the lighting spell Disenchantment had cast earlier. In fact, the light collected in front of Chrono's face, forming a sphere that looked _exactly_ like Disenchantment's lighting spell.

"Disenchantment? Are you here?"

No one said anything, but the ball of blue light stayed right where it was. If nothing else, it kept Chrono company.

_That was her spell. What is it doing here?_

Chrono rose to his feet, and the ball of light followed him. He turned, first to his left and then to his right, and it stayed in front of him. He even tried walking forwards and backwards, and it stayed about the same distance away.

_No sense in sticking around here. Better get moving. And hey, isn't that light the same color as Nadia's wedding dress? I can pretend she's the one guiding me.  
Nadia, I'll get back to you, somehow._


	6. Splendid Gold and Jade

Chapter 5 – Splendid Gold and Jade

How splendid Jade was!  
Yes, she met me near the flowered garden  
Our paths side by side as we walked the road of knowledge  
She bowed to me and said I was very clever

How strong Gold was!  
Yes, she met me in the crowded lunchtime halls while it snowed outside  
Side by side we talked of the universe's hidden truths  
She bowed to me and said I was insightful

How magnificent were Jade and Gold!  
Yes, they met on the south slopes of the hill near where they lived  
Side by side they chased the hours away watching the clouds  
They bowed to each other and said "that was good"

A.D. 2305

"Keep eating like that and you're going to get fat," said Samsara. "I mean it."

Jinling laughed. "I'm already pudgy. How much worse can it get?"

Before Samsara could scold her again, Jinling took another chocolate out of a box on her bed and popped it in her mouth. Although the box was nearly empty, another one, still sealed in plastic, sat underneath it.

"Another?" Samsara scowled in disgust. "Really, Jinling, you're going to blow up like a balloon, and then you'll have to roll everywhere you go. Do you want that?"

Jinling stuck her tongue in the general direction of her friend and reached for another chocolate. Before she ate her candy, she paused to wipe a sugary brown stain off of her bedspread.

"You're just too much," said Samsara.

"Who cares how I look?" said Jinling.

"Will people remember your work if they don't remember your face?" Samsara poked Jinling's nose with her index finger.

"I'm not going to be posting photos of myself in the journals, you know," said Jinling. "I'm a scientist, not a model."

"Keep eating like that and you won't have any choice," said Samsara.

Jinling giggled and turned back to her work: a notebook filled with sketches, calculations, notes, and, embarrassingly, a few doodles. All of the contents except for the doodles had to do with her primary research project in applied temporal mathematics. (The doodles were mostly kittens with firearms attacking ugly looking dogs—Jinling left no doubt that she was a cat person.) Although some of the notes were the sorts of things anyone could find in a temporal mathematics textbook at the postgraduate level, many were the original brainchild of Jinling Lan and Samsara Ashtear. Some of the older original ideas had even appeared in their Ph.D. theses.

Both had passed their examinations with highest honors, and both had vigorously pursued their research careers since finishing up. Their extension of Balthasar's work helped them become the most famous pair of innovative collaborators in the field. What interested Jinling now, though, was the unpublished work.

"I thought of a name," Jinling said.

"And you haven't told me yet?" said Samsara. "I'm shocked."

"This time it's for real," said Jinling. "I know what I'll call it."

"Are you going to tell me, or are you going to beat around the bush?" said Samsara.

"It's _Golden Days_," said Jinling. "That's final, too."

"I'll bet," said Samsara. "You've changed it how many times so far?"

"I told you," said Jinling, "it's final this time. And this one sound like a proper name for a boat."

"I believe you," said Samsara. "Sure. Just like last time."

Jinling popped another chocolate into her mouth.

"Why that, though?" said Samsara.

"It's the result of how many years of hard work?" Jinling spoke with her mouth stuffed "Those were our golden days. Still are, I suppose."

Samsara sighed. "Better than _Epoch 2_, at least."

XXX

Beyond Time

Pain and Passion did not return to haunt Chrono on his journey through Jinling Caverns. Neither did Disenchantment.

For a while, Chrono encountered no signs of life at all. He prowled around in complete silence. Were it not for the ball of light floating over his head, he would have been in complete darkness, as well, and at times even it flickered off for short periods. If it even didn't come back on, Chrono figured he was as good as dead, if he wasn't already.

About an hour passed in the same way before anything of note happened, but then Chrono saw something that piqued his interest: during one of the periods in which his light ball went dark, Chrono found that he was not in complete darkness. The rock face ahead of him glowed blue. It was a very faint blue, but it was there. It was something other than pitch darkness, if he wasn't imagining it. Although it very easily could have been a trick of his brain or a side effect of his eyes not having time to adjust to the darkness, Chrono preferred to take what shred of hope he could and hold onto it for all it was worth.

At first, it wasn't worth much. As Chrono made his way deeper and deeper into the cave, he convinced himself that he really did see a light besides his own, but he couldn't quite confirm it. It took five or six sightings for him to notice that it was really there and it was growing brighter as he moved.

_Disenchantment?_ Chrono thought. _Is she still alive?_

A few turns later, Chrono found the light brighter still, and even better, he heard a sound to go with it.

_Footsteps! So it's certainly someone, but is it Disenchantment?_

The footsteps grew fainter with time, as if their owner were moving away. Chrono made his best guess as to the direction of their source and attempted to follow them, but as he did, they sped up. The other person must have been running.

_To get away from me?_ Chrono wondered. _Probably not that demon, then._

Chrono took off as fast as he could in attempt to catch up. Before long, he found himself staring at the back of a girl who looked nothing at all like Disenchantment.

"Wait up!" he shouted at the girl. "I mean you no harm, miss."

The girl ground to a halt and turned around. "You do not?"

"No," said Chrono. "I'm just lost here."

"As am I," said the girl.

_Great. She won't be helping me get out, then._

"Completely lost?" said Chrono.

"Mostly lost," said the girl. "If you are completely lost, then you might want to follow me, as I have a greater chance of escaping than someone completely lost."

_She talks like Lucca. Looks a bit like her, too, but shorter. Right hair, though. Looks more human than Disenchantment._

"I'm glad for any help you can give me," said Chrono. "And we're probably safer if we stick together. My name's Chrono, by the way."

"I am happy to meet you, Chrono," the girl said. "I am Coppelia. Please allow me to be of service."


	7. Rites of Gold and Jade

Chapter 6 – Rites of Gold and Jade

While we all  
Remember the marriage rites of Stone and Precious Jewel  
I still recall  
Those ancient unions yielding beauties dual  
The lowly origin of Gold  
From heatless home in snowy cold  
And timeless comes our clever Jade  
Whose pedigree the world made  
Of course I know  
That every rose must have its thorns  
You love the bull  
But lost in thought forget its horns

A.D. 2275

Trann had some of the harshest winters anywhere, Lan Shiyin believed. No dome overhead protected residents of the outskirts of the city from the elements, and for three months out of the year, that meant a constant threat of snowfall. Lan survived by hiring himself out to do labor for any country folk not strong enough to work outside during the cold months, so he usually considered the snow a blessing, but he still hated it at times.

Cold meant layers upon layers of clothing. Lan needed his wool hat, his down-stuffed coat, his insulated pants, his fur boots, and his oversized gloves just to stave off frostbite. He needed them even when he was not working; today, for instance, he was just going to the market to pick up a present for Ning Qinshi. Ten minutes there, ten minutes back, and twenty shopping—it added up quickly. Had he left his winter clothes at home, he might have lost a finger or two.

What bothered him at this moment was that he could not feel anything through his gloves. That didn't matter when he was handling a shovel or a firewood axe, but it made smaller and more delicate items difficult to grasp. So clumsy was his grip that he dropped the gold hairpin he just purchased somewhere along the road, and he did not notice until he was nearly home.

The hairpin cost him a week's pay, so he felt obligated to make a thorough search for it, lest he find himself lamenting its loss to Qinshi. She would forgive him, of course, and she would commend his efforts, but he would miss her broad smile. More than the meager money Lan received for doing his wretched work, Lan valued the broad smile that spread across Qinshi's face whenever he did something to please her. Even when her family could not afford to pay their electric bill, that smile would light up any room of her house. Lan loved it more than anything. No other reason could have kept him living outside of the dome.

Lan was not unskilled. He could have had a better life, but that would mean leaving Qinshi behind, and he could not bring himself to do that, for her sake as well as for his. The thought of her suffering through her winters alone tore at his heart like a razor. All he could do was work until he could save enough money to take her away and marry her.

Qinshi had the talent to be whatever she wanted. Dreams of escaping her poverty to pursue a professional career had haunted her since before she and Lan met, but circumstances would not let her leave home. Not yet. Not until Lan could afford to help her move, and she could not move until her family's house was paid for. Then they could live with at least basic utilities.

That day would come soon, however, and Lan knew it. He knew he could afford something extra nice for Qinshi without setting the rest of their schedule back any, so he bought her a gold hairpin so she could fill her family's house with her smile once more before she joined him. She could feel his affection for her every time she wore it, and he could stay humble whenever he saw her wearing it. Lan did not want to forget the work he had to endure to get his family the kind of happy life they deserved. He would not forget those backbreaking winters, and he would make sure his children learned the same lesson.

Something shiny caught Lan's eye as he traced his path back to the store. Underneath a tree, a ray of sunlight gleamed off a golden object half-buried in a bank of snow. Lan's heart rose as the image froze in his mind.

XXX

Lucca Ashtear sat on a padded table in a medical examination room at Greenwood Hospital, wearing a thin jade-colored gown around her body and a small smile on her face. She held in her hands a clipboard; on that was a short report recently printed out for her by her doctor, which she read with great interest. The doctor's test results contained good news.

So much of Lucca's life had gone toward the purpose of exploring the world around her. She found herself a pioneer in multiple fields in three different centuries. Even Balthasar himself considered her an equal in many ways. Still, even the two of them put together could only accomplish so much. Hopping through time could not extend her life any; the end would come eventually.

That was why the report amused her so.

Reports in similar print on similar paper had brought her a share of her happy moments through the rest of her life. She could still remember the first time she was published in a scientific journal. She could remember ordering two copies of that issue for herself, one to keep in her library and one to cut out and frame her paper. She had only been the second author on that paper; the first was Balthasar.

This smile was different, though. The feeling rushing through Lucca's chest, flushing her cheeks, and carrying a dizzy spell to her head was something new to her. The report on the page was not hers, but it felt like it might as well have been.

The universe remained a mystery for the time being, but Lucca was okay with that, if only for a moment. Calabi-Nu could wait. Her new advancement was in the area of life sciences, not physics.

Lucca Ashtear patted her inflated stomach. She closed her eyes and thought only of the cycle of life. The future.

XXX

Beyond Time

Chrono found his new travel companion to be a welcome relief from the horror of stalking his way alone through Jinling Caverns. Coppelia lacked Disenchantment's condescending attitude, and while Chrono had not yet managed to find out much about her, even as much as who she was or what she was doing in such a strange place, at least he didn't feel like she was hiding something from him. _That_ little quirk of Disenchantment's bothered him even while she was gone.

Coppelia took pains to be polite and deferential. If she did so much as accidentally step in Chrono's path, she would apologize profusely and keep her distance for a while. She always made sure she led the way down the darker tunnels (or so she said; they were all dark), presumably to shield Chrono from anything that might be lying in ambush. Chrono only reluctantly allowed her to do so, though he admitted that he had more reason to feel hunted than Coppelia did.

Coppelia kept silent for most of the walk, except when Chrono struck up the courage to ask her a question or two. She never had much to say, but she gave off the impression that there just wasn't that much to say more than that she didn't want to talk. Only a few things about her bothered Chrono at all.

"Coppelia," Chrono began, "did you put out your light when I started chasing you?"

"My light?" Coppelia said.

"Yes," said Chrono. "I first noticed you when I got near because the cave didn't get completely dark when my light went out."

Coppelia shook her head. "Your light does not appear to me to have gone out."

"It flickers on and off at times," said Chrono. "And when it got dark back there, I could still see. I assumed that meant there was another light somewhere."

"You assumed correctly, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. She reached in to a deep pocket on the front of her dress and produced a long, thin, blue, cylindrical object. When she shook it, it began to glow. "This is what I used."

"Impressive," said Chrono. "I've never seen anything like that before."

"But Mister Chrono," said Coppelia, "I have never seen anything like your light, either. Please tell me where you acquired it."

Chrono thought for a second. "I don't really know where it came from. I suspect it belonged to my old frie…" Chrono cut himself off. "My old guide. She disappeared, but she left this with me."

Coppelia stopped and shot her head around in Chrono's direction. "What was your guide's name, Mister Chrono?"

"Disenchantment," said Chrono. On hearing his answer, Coppelia turned forward again and resumed her casual polite demeanor.

"I apologize to Mister Chrono for my manner," said Coppelia. "I had to be sure that your guide was not anyone I know."

Chrono chuckled. "You've got nothing to apologize for. You're been much nicer to me than most of the other people I've been meeting lately."

"That is my job," said Coppelia. "I live to serve."

Chrono's chuckle ballooned into a full-out laugh. "You know, at first you reminded me of someone else I know, but your personality is miles removed from hers."

"Does this displease you, Mister Chrono?" Coppelia said in earnest.

"Not at all," said Chrono. "I'm relieved, actually."

"If I have displeased you at all, please allow me to make it up by pointing out something I have noticed."

"You haven't done anything wrong," said Chrono. "Still, what have you noticed?"

"Your light," said Coppelia. "I have noticed its flickering, and while I have been unable to find a complete pattern in its behavior, I have been able to classify two distinct, consistent sets of behavior."

"Oh, really?" said Chrono. "I can do that, too. Sometimes it's on, and sometimes it's off. Usually it's on."

"Indeed," said Coppelia, "but have you noticed that it turns if and only if we approach an intersection, and when it turns off, it always does so for either exactly three seconds or exactly two seconds?"

Chrono blinked.

"It is true," said Coppelia. "Always three seconds or two seconds. Never one. Never four. Five is right out."

Chrono attempted a gulp, but he took in a breath at the same time and nearly found himself choking. "That's… that's a clue!"

"A clue?" said Coppelia.

"This may be a hunch, but I think Disenchantment gave me more than a light. I think she gave me a way out."


	8. Flower from Paradise, Part I

Chapter 7 – Flower from Paradise, Part I

She is a flower from paradise  
Atop a hill she holds her reign  
Though by the winter's chill she dies  
When spring returns she's born again  
For if her fate's to touch the sky  
Should cyclic life make it in vain?  
In vain those nights once soaked in tears  
In vain her anxious gnawing fears  
Her future ever doomed to pass  
Beyond her, swept away by time  
She sees herself, as in a glass  
The image once but in her head now out  
Can such a picture someday ease her doubt?

Beyond Time

Jinling Caverns did not change. The walls were as featureless as ever, the air remained uninvitingly stuffy, and the exit was still far out of reach. Disenchantment's light hovered over Chrono's head in the same manner as it had earlier. Nothing about the situation was any different, save for something abstract. Something that wasn't really there. The calculations in Coppelia's mind and Chrono's application of her observations made all the difference in the world; though everything looked precisely as it had before, that same look was somehow less bleak when seen in light of new information.

While Coppelia remained as calm and collected as anyone ever was, Chrono's heart raced, and he found himself a fair bit more loquacious than usual. "Coppelia, we have our way out. The last thing Disenchantment said to me before she disappeared was, 'Three right, two left.'"

"How did she disappear?" Coppelia asked.

"I'm not really sure about that. I got hit over the head and knocked unconscious about that time. In any case, the point is that she must have known something bad was going to happen, so she gave me this light orb as a guide to get me out of this cave. It's so simple! When it flashes three times, we should take the right fork in the path, and when it flashes twice, we should go left. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. Do you?"

"We did not notice that it only flashed at intersections, nor did we notice that the duration of its off periods was always either two or three seconds."

"Yeah, well, I would have noticed that eventually. And I did put the pieces together, didn't I?"

"That you did."

Chrono quickened his pace. "We could be out of this place soon. The riddle is solved. We aren't lost anymore."

The journey through Jinling Caverns was no longer monotonous. Previously, when each twist and turn of their path had nothing to distinguish it from the last, there was no way to tell if they had been making any sort of progress at all. Now, a fuller understanding of Disenchantment's light lifted spirits all around in several ways. Chrono no longer feared an imminent and lonely death. He also no longer suffered from a complete lack of orientation; there were right ways and wrong ways to go, and those were better for the psyche than identically wrong ways. He felt excitement at the possibility of escaping. He felt a bit of pride at being useful to his new friend. And, of course, his chances of seeing Nadia again increased substantially if he could make it out of the cave.

But nothing came easily. Disenchantment's disappearance bothered Chrono. If something prowling about were powerful enough to drive her off or even kill her, he couldn't let his guard down. The demons Passion and Pain frightened him, both because they showed every sign of being able to strike stealthily and because he had absolutely no idea what they were up to. Worse, Chrono had a feeling they weren't the most powerful foe he might find roaming about. While he wasn't sure how much to trust anything said by demons, Passion and Pain had mentioned working for someone.

And when Chrono rounded the final corner of the final intersection, he choked on his fears.

A creature—a demon, maybe—roughly the size of a small house stood in the middle of a fairly large room. A glistening shell covered the sides and back of its bulbous body. Its arms, thick and black and ending in five-fingered hands with nasty claws, stood stiffly in front of it, challenging them to step closer. The many sets of horns on its head and the set of teeth in its mouth looked nearly identical, from a safe distance. Its eyes glowed red.

The demon breathed as loudly as an average person might speak. The sound of its breath started out wheezy, but it grew raspier. The demon appeared to be salivating at the sight of its prey.

Before Chrono could react, Coppelia pulled a scarf out of her pocket and threw it over Disenchantment's light.

"What are you doing?" Chrono shouted.

"I wish to know if that monster can see us better in the dark."

"You what?" Chrono hardly had time to reply before he had to duck a flaming orange projectile from the mouth of the beast. "You want to see?"

Coppelia hopped over to Chrono's side and removed the scarf. "My judgment was poor. This monster must have the advantage in the dark if it has lived in this cave longer than we have."

Rather than listen to Coppelia, Chrono braced for another assault. It didn't come.

"Look," Coppelia said simply.

When the monster looked directly at the uncovered light, it reared its head back and roared.

"The light must hurt it," Coppelia explained.

Chrono's eyes widened. "Look out!" He dove to the side and pushed Coppelia along with him, and not a moment too soon. The floor where they had been standing seconds before exploded in a brilliant flash of light.

Coppelia shook her head. "The light! The monster absorbed the light."

"And fired it back," said Chrono. "We don't get any breaks in this fight. If it's light, it zaps us. If it's dark…"

Chrono jumped out of the way of another ball of fire. Coppelia narrowly avoided the getting ripped to shreds by the monster's claws, but she ran into the side wall.

Coppelia frowned. "It would appear that we are caught between a rock monster and a hard place."


	9. Flower from Paradise, Part II

Chapter 8 – Flower from Paradise, Part II

"Flowers lure me, rocks ease me. Day suddenly ends.  
Bears, dragons, tempestuous on mountain and river,  
Startle the forest and make the heights tremble."  
--Li Po

Each time the monster attacked Chrono or Coppelia, the walls of the room shook. Debris chipped off and scattered across the floor, making slipping a real danger if either made a careless attempt to dodge a fireball or swinging claw. With each attack, the monster reduced the margin for error in avoiding the next.

The exploding light beams were the worst of the bunch. The monster's claws would leave scratches across the floor or wall, and the fireballs threw a few stone chips here and there, but the explosions wreaked havoc upon Chono's vision, his footing, and any part of his body pelted with the shards of rock that bounced around the room after each blast. The pain alone was beginning to add up, but the other complications made the situation almost unbearable.

He had to escape somehow. Chrono signaled to Coppelia and began a mad dash to the left side of the room. If Coppelia went around on the right, perhaps the monster's divided attention would give them a brief respite.

She didn't go right, though. As soon as she saw Chrono waving, she ran to his side and tossed her scarf back over Disenchantment's light.

"What are you…? I wanted you over…" Chrono leaped to his left to avoid being roasted alive. Coppelia followed him.

"Say something!" Chrono implored.

"I am counting," said Coppelia.

She then pulled the cover off the light, gripped Chrono's arm, and pulled him to her right before the monster could incinerate either of them.

Chrono pulled back, but Coppelia refused to let go.

"We should go for the exit," he told her.

"No. If we do, then the monster will be able to guess our moves. It will have the advantage, and then we will be dead. Do you wish to die?"

"No." Chrono dodged a furious slash from the monster's claws.

"Please listen to me, then," Coppelia continued. "Do as I tell you. For now, cover your light again. I intend to attack."

With no time to think, Chrono did as he was told. The light went out, and everything became invisible. He heard the shuffling of some feet followed by a high-pitched scream from Coppelia, and then something made a loud cracking sound. Before he could interpret any of the sounds, he felt Coppelia's hand on his shoulder.

"Mister Chrono, it did not work. Remove the scarf and jump to your left."

Chrono pulled the scarf off of the light and began his dodging maneuver, but before he could get his feet off the ground, Coppelia once again pulled him to his right. This time, the monster's explosion hit to the left of where he had been standing.

"Good," said Coppelia. "We tricked it. Now I shall attack again."

Chrono watched as Coppelia charged the monster unarmed. His hand moved instinctively to where his sword would normally hang from his belt, but it came up empty. All he could do was hope she was stronger than she looked.

Apparently, though, she wasn't. Before she could get within ten feet of the monster, it backhanded her with its claws, and her diminutive body went flying across the room into the wall. Crack. Chrono's head hurt vicariously.

"Coppelia!"

The monster ignored him and stepped toward the body slumped on the floor. Chrono winced, but before the monster could maul Coppelia, she collected herself and ran across the perimeter of the room.

"You're…?"

"I am fine, Mister Chrono. However, I have been unable to devise a winning plan. If you know anything I do not, now would be an ideal…"

Another fireball interrupted her.

"I don't have a sword. If I did, I could try to kill it."

"I could not approach it. Its defenses are too quick. Breaking through would take a feat of magic."

"Magic!"

"I did not intend that as a serious suggestion."

Chrono dodged yet another fireball then waved Coppelia away. During the brief interval between attacks, he chanted a spell. Above the monster's head, a pocket of air began to glow bright yellow, and charges in the surrounding air ripped apart with a bang. Several bolts of magical lightning struck the monster's head.

The monster snorted. It looked a little surprised by the development, but it hardly appeared hurt.

"Rats!" Chrono stomped his foot, and he slipped on a loose rock. Coppelia immediately ran over to pick him up.

"If I cover our light, it will no longer be able to charge its explosion attack. I believe it powers that attack with energy from…"

"We've been over this!" Chrono complained.

"Look." Coppelia covered the light again. After a pause, she uncovered it and pushed Chrono aside.

"Did you notice?"

Chrono shook his head.

"I have our answer, Mister Chrono. Take off the scarf when I tell you to."

Chrono barely had time to nod his head before Coppelia threw her scarf over the light and dashed off into the darkness.

Chrono's head hurt from the fight, from the rocks hitting it, and from the lights going on and off. He could hardly move his feet. He could hardly feel his hands. He could hardly hear when Coppelia called out to him.

He still heard, though. He heard, and he pulled at the scarf. By now, his eyes closed automatically when exposed to the blinding brightness, so he almost didn't see Coppelia.

But he heard her. He heard her feet, and he heard a cracking sound. This one was different, though. Following this crack, the monster let out a pained roar.

"I hit him," said Coppelia. "Look, Mister Chrono."

Chrono, eyes hardly adjusted to the light, could see the monster in front of him, howling at the ceiling. Beside it, Coppelia pulled her arm out of the side of its cracked shell.

Chrono saw Coppelia punch the monster again. As she did, her fist lit up with a light green aura. Coppelia, it seemed, knew a little magic of her own.

The second blow shattered the entire left side of the monster's skull, sending it into a rage. An undirected rage, at that. Coppelia immediately ran behind the monster's back and began pummeling it from that angle. More fragments of its shell fell to the floor, in pieces. A few hits later, its roar sputtered out, and its head sank to the floor.

Chrono leaned against the wall and breathed the deepest breath he'd had all day.


	10. Sweet Soul

Chapter 9 – Sweet Soul

Winding road from somewhere to nowhere  
Traversed by someone loyal and fair  
Bid, she was, from master's side  
Temporal things to cast aside  
A sweet soul on airs to glide  
So long the road back home does seem  
From there to here, as in a dream  
For in this dream, though lost in shade  
She could her being's duties pay  
A friend so dear  
A friend whose joy's no longer here  
Did dare to test the hand of fate  
And so the ironheart arrives, before it is too late

When Chrono's heart finally slowed to its usual pace, he allowed himself a look around the chamber. The body of the monster seemed to take up even more space than before now that it was dead. Fragments of its shell littered the ground, mixed in with debris from the walls and floor. They were mostly large, and a few of them were pointed. The corpse itself gave off a putrid smell that Chrono could only fully appreciate after the battle.

He ran his hand across the wall where one of the monster's fireballs had landed; it was warm. If the thing's attacks could heat up rock to the point where it could still be warm after that much time, he hated to think what a shot could have done to his flesh. The odds of surviving a clash—unarmed—with that monster looked even dimmer in retrospect with all the adrenaline cooled off.

Chrono threw a glance at his traveling companion. "That was pretty impressive," he said to her. "It's been a while since I've seen someone fight that well barehanded."

"I think nothing of it, Mister Chrono," she answered. "You should not, either. I could ascertain from observing you during the battle that you are no stranger to dealing with these sorts of confrontations. Am I correct?"

Chrono almost laughed. "You could say that. I've had my fair share of tussles against the big, the bad, and the ugly. I prefer being better equipped, though."

"You fight with a sword, do you not?"

"How did you know?"

"Your hands moved as if to draw a sword at the beginning of the fight. The movement appeared to be reflexive. I can only conclude that you are accustomed to carrying a blade at your side."

"Right again."

"The road ahead may only become more dangerous. I do not know if I can protect the both of us by myself, so…."

Chrono scowled. "Protect me? I know I didn't account for myself as well as I normally do back there, but that doesn't mean…."

"Please relax, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. "I only mean to urge you to take up a piece of our fallen monster's shell as your new weapon. There should be several long, thin, sharp edges lying around."

The idea appealed to Chrono, so rather than argue, he set about looking for something with which to defend himself in case of another encounter. It didn't take long for him to find a sufficiently sharp sliver with just the sort of curve he preferred. It ended in a point, but its edges, sharp near the pointed side, dulled down into a shape that could pass as a handle in an emergency. Thus, it could be made to function as a crude sword. Swinging the makeshift, completely non-synthetic weapon around, Chrono felt a bit like the world's first swordsmith back at Ioka Village, turning an animal bone into a means to hunt more effectively.

"This will do nicely," he told Coppelia. "I feel a bit more like myself already."

"That is a good thing," said Coppelia. "Indeed, I shall consider it part of my duty to ensure your safety, if it pleases you, Mister Chrono."

"No problem. None at all."

"Then you do not feel at all uncomfortable to be aided by one so small in stature?"

"Forget what I said before. I'm still a bit in a haze here. I'm not even sure where _here_ is, anyway, or where I'm going."

Coppelia put her hand to her chin and leaned her head to one side, as if she had never struck a genuinely contemplative pose before. "Where is it you would like to go?"

"Home to Nadia." Chrono said the words automatically. His desire to return to his beloved was that internalized.

"I see that you are sincere," said Coppelia. "However, I do not know of any land called Nadia around here."  
"Nadia isn't a land. She's a woman."

"I see. Why do you wish to see her, and why do you refer to her as your home?"

"She lives where my home is. I belong with her."

"If you do not mind my asking, Mister Chrono, do you love her?"

"Of course I do."

"Then we must find a way to return you to her, for both your sake and for hers. Is your home nearby?"

"My home isn't in this… place. Time. I don't know how to get there."

Coppelia's expression changed, and she began speaking more in earnest. "Are you, then, a resident of the world of time? If so, then are you from any particular time?"

"Eleventh century, actually."

Coppelia looked disappointed. "I see. Then you are not from my time."

"So you're trying to get home, too?"

For the first time in the conversation, Coppelia looked mildly surprised. "Mister Chrono, you are very clever. I am trying to return home, but before I do, I have work to complete in this land. In fact, I fear I am unable to return merely of my own volition. I must locate a person who might be able to get me back. If you so desire, Mister Chrono, you should accompany me on my quest to find this person. We may then return together."

Chrono looked doubtful. "You said you're from a different time."

"I am from your future."

"Maybe I've met you before."

"You are a time traveler?"

Chrono smirked. "Yes, I am. Or was. I wanted to settle down with Nadia and live a slightly less exciting life, but circumstances got in the way. I don't really know what happened, but now I'm stuck here. I don't like it, either. Let's find your friend quickly and go home, shall we?"

"I believe that is the best course of action."

"Just who is it we're looking for, anyway?"

"Her name is Orchid."

"Orchid, like the flower?"

Coppelia thought for a second before replying, "Yes, like the flower."

"Is she from your time?"

"She is. I do not know how she came to reside here, but I must find out. I must ensure her safe passage back home."

"Very noble of you. But, uh, where do we go from here?"

Chrono and Coppelia approached the room's back exit. The floor behind the monster had fewer rocks scattered across it. The back wall was smooth and cold. The door itself was wide and, strangely, square. Beyond it was a stairway.

The stairs were the first bit of Jinling Caverns that were unmistakably manmade. They were hard on the feet and a little too small for someone of his size, so Chrono stood close to the wall in case he lost his footing. Coppelia didn't seem to have any trouble ascending more rapidly than Chrono dared, but she hung back to stay near his light.

Their path twisted around in true staircase fashion for what must have been several flights worth of steps, but eventually they found themselves reaching flatter ground. The passageway did not branch at all; it only rose slightly as they went on. After about a hundred feet, the walls grew lighter, and the air grew less stuffy. The floor's slope disappeared until Chrono and Coppelia were walking on level ground. After one final corner, a light-filled opening appeared in front of them.

"We're out!" Chrono shouted. He sprinted toward the exit, feeling light and giddy. Coppelia followed at her own pace.

"This does seem to be the end of it," she said. "If only we knew where to go next."

Outside the mouth of the cave, the rocky ground gave way to dirt patched with patches of light blue grass. Some conifer trees grew around the perimeter of what looked like a forest clearing, with the cave at one end and a path leading deeper into the woods at the other end. The sky overhead glowed a soft green color, with a few clouds visible. Chrono could see neither sun nor moon above him, but he guessed it was morning.

Chrono sat down on the grass in the middle of the clearing, stretched his arms over his head, and yawned. The ground felt slightly wet where it was green and soft where it wasn't. Everything smelled like the outdoors. Like trees. There wasn't any wind, but the air still felt nice. Anything would have been better than the thick, oppressive atmosphere deep inside the cave.

But when Coppelia stepped outside, the tranquility of the scene shattered like a block of ice hit with a hammer. Chrono saw someone following Coppelia; he jumped to his feet and shouted to her.

"Behind you!"

Coppelia moved so fast he almost couldn't see her. In an instant, she dashed forward and to her left about five feet, spun around, and waved her fists in a threatening motion at her as-yet shadowy stalker. Then, just as quickly as the tension built up, it melted away. The figure now exiting the cave turned out to be a young and relatively benign-looking girl.

The new girl bore no weapons, and she dressed in a fancy robe that seemed more the sort of thing one would wear when one wants to be looked at, rather than the sort of thing one would wear to a fight. It was a golden color, with red-brown trim and a shimmer not unlike that of a still pond on a quiet morning. Her face was at once plain and somehow otherworldly. She had her hair up in a large knot on the back of her head, tied with a golden ribbon. She kept her hands inside the pockets of her robe. She was everything but threatening.

"Are you lost, too?" Chrono asked her.

The girl ignored Chrono and faced Coppelia. Chrono, bothered by this, tried again, louder: "Hey, are you lost, too?"

The girl paid him no mind. Instead, she addressed Coppelia directly. "Young Coppelia, I saw you enter this realm, and I could not help but come to visit you."

Coppelia did not bother to mince words. "Why me?"

"Never have I seen one with such potential for great understanding. I had no choice; I had to come to see you to see if I could learn from you, and if not, to see if I could help you learn anything."

"Hello?" Chrono offered. "I want to learn. I want to learn how to get out of here."

"I do not know anything that would be of value to one of this world," said Coppelia. "I do not know why you would think that I would."

"I would think that would be obvious to anyone familiar with me," said the new girl. "For I am Jiao. I appear to those worthy to see me."

Chrono resorted to hopping up and down and flailing his arms wildly. "I've done a few heroic things in my day. Can't I be worthy?"

Jiao laughed. "Your friend is awfully noisy, isn't he?"

"Please keep in mind that he has had a difficult journey," Coppelia said. "He is a kind fellow, and he does show signs of great heroic potential. If you just passed through the cave, you surely saw a great beast dead on the floor near the end. Chrono aided in slaying it."

"Nevertheless," said Jiao, "I came when I saw you. I don't know why your arrival here was such a surprise; you appear in no prophecies I know of, and you resemble no mythical or mystical beings of which I am aware. Still, your mind intrigues me. I don't know what it is about it, but it seems to contain within it more power than I would expect in a god. And yet, you say you are nothing special."

"Indeed, Miss Jiao," Coppelia said while offering a humble curtsey, "I am not. I am merely a servant here to locate Miss Orchid and bring her home. I have also sworn to aid Mister Chrono in his quest to return to his beloved."

Jiao took a moment to study Coppelia, and then she turned her gaze on Chrono. At last she said, "Now that I see your friend, I must judge him a worthy hero, as well. I do so reluctantly, as his arrival has taken me completely by surprise. Tell me, Chrono, did you arrive here only recently?"

Chrono assumed a more dignified pose before he responded. "I did. While at my own wedding, a large Gate swallowed me whole and took me here. I then met some girl called Disenchantment, I got lost in that cave, I got attacked, I ran into Coppelia, and then we fought that monster and escaped. It hasn't been long at all."

"And you, too, seek Orchid?"

"Coppelia tells me she might know how to get home."

"Intriguing," said Jiao. "Do you have any idea where to begin looking?"

Coppelia answered for the both of them, "We do not, but we are prepared to turn over every stone until we achieve our objective."

Jiao pulled her right hand out of her pocket for the first time since she appeared. In it, she held a large piece of jade. She said, "Inscribed on this is enough information to get you started on your quest. Please put it to good use."

Chrono took the jade from her and held it up to his face. Sure enough, he could make out some barely legible writings carved into it.

"Are you well armed?" Jiao asked. "Please return the jade."

"What?" Chrono hardly had time to say anything before Jiao snatched the stone from his hand, along with his sword.

"This will not do for a weapon," she said. "Not here. There are too many dangers afoot. Allow me to make it better."

With that, Jiao held the jade up to the blunt end of Chrono's sword. As she did, it began to give off a light so brilliant that Chrono had to look away. When it finally died down, he saw Jiao holding the two objects as before, but they were fused together, and the jade had assumed the shape of a proper sword hilt, but with a rough grip made from something resembling rubber; moreover, the blade of the sword looked sharper and easier to wield.

"It is unwise to march unprepared into these woods," Jiao said. "Take this, out of wisdom."

Chrono took his sword back and gave it a few practice swings. Satisfied, he began to sheath it in his belt. In the process, he noticed that the writings on the jade were still intact.

"Thank you," he said.

"We both thank you," said Coppelia. "We shall be even more grateful should the information written on that rock prove useful."

"It shall," said Jiao. "Otherwise, I would not have given it to you."

"Does this mean you are leaving us?" Coppelia asked.

"It is not my duty to guide you, but merely to announce your arrival and get you on your feet. I feel I have accomplished that nicely, and as such, I do intend to bid you farewell before too much longer."

"Who are you, though?" Chrono asked. "You gave us your name, but that doesn't tell me anything about you. This whole place operates on such a different level from what I'm used to."

"My name is my identity," said Jiao. "I am the one who greets those who deserve to be greeted by me."

"And who decides that?" Chrono demanded.

"I do," said Jiao. "I certainly could not leave such dealings in the hands of a mortal, and most others of my kind are too busy for my menial work."

"Mortal?"

"This is where all mortals end up."

Chrono sat down on the grass again. "This is depressing."

"This is only the beginning for both of you," said Jiao. "Now, refer to the jade when you have questions about the land, and keep in mind that you are currently in the far north, on the border of Kuei's domain.

"Kuei?" Chrono frowned. "Who is that?"

"Kuei is one of four divine rulers. Many hold sway in this place, from those in the Castle of Dreams to those serving various minor warlords off in the untamed wilds, but in the immediate area, you will find that Kuei, Qilin, Feng, and Lung are the most important. They watch over the territory on this island."

"Island?"

"This island is a giant land mass in the Sea of Sorrows, beyond the End of Time."

"I do seem to remember Disenchantment saying something to that effect. She also mentioned the Castle of Dreams, on the Orchid Mountain. She said I was supposed to go there with her, but then she disappeared."

"You may still meet her again," said Jiao. "I wouldn't bet against it, but then, betting is considered somewhat undemure for us divine beings."

Coppelia spoke up. "Can you tell us anything about Miss Orchid? Is she connected at all with the Orchid Mountain?"

"That I cannot say," said Jiao. "I know of no one called Orchid, though I must admit that even I overlook those entering this land. I did not see Chrono at first. In fact, it's somewhat of an accident that I even know of you. Did you come here by accident, by any chance?"

"No," said Coppelia. "I came to find Miss Orchid. However, her coming here was an accident."

"That explains things," said Jiao. "I did not see your arrival, either, because it was a direct consequence of Orchid's. I only saw you because your mind is so different from anything I have encountered before. In any case, I regret that I cannot offer you any advice on where to find your friend, but I can urge you to ask around."

Chrono stood up again, leaning on his new sword. Tired from the fight or not, the prospect of finding some clue as to how to get home rejuvenated him. "Through these woods, then?"

"That is where I would start," said Jiao. "I wish you good fortune, and may your stay here be long and prosperous."

"Prosperous I can go for," said Chrono, "but I'm not really up for being here long."

Jiao did not reply. She merely placed her hands back in her pockets, made a quick bow to Chrono and another to Coppelia, and faded away, like a ghost, leaving no trace.

Coppelia immediately started down the path into the trees. "Mister Chrono," she said, "I would like to borrow your sword while we walk."


	11. From Our Dear Ones Parted

Chapter 10 – From Our Dear Ones Parted

As they walked down the winding path in the forest, Chrono kept watch for anything potentially hostile while Coppelia concentrated on the hilt of Chrono's sword, hoping to glean from it some information on their whereabouts. But little came of it; Coppelia found herself utterly unable to make out anything other than a dark, glossy, empty surface.

"I see nothing here," she said.

"Did that fairy girl lie to us?" Chrono wondered. "I wouldn't be too terribly surprised."

"I can not say for certain," said Coppelia. "What I can tell you now, Mister Chrono, is that I can read nothing on your sword at the moment, but given the transient nature of all things in this environment, there might appear something more helpful in the future. I suggest checking back from time to time in case anything appears."

Chrono took his weapon back and marched onward. The trees grew thicker as he went. Some green light filtered down through the canopy above him, but less could reach him as the sky more and more disappeared behind the leaves. The trees were not any kind immediately familiar to Chrono; those near the clearing had been mostly pines or trees closely resembling pines, but the farther he traveled, the more variety he saw. Some looked about right for a forest of mild climate, but others were clearly tropical. It was as if the forest were a collection of plastic models set up for display by someone with no knowledge of botany whatsoever. The only common thread among the trees was that they were all very tall, with the exception of a smattering of shrubs and bramblebushes blocking passage away from the beaten path.

"This is just as monotonous as the cave," said Chrono. "What's with these trees, anyway?"

"Mister Chrono is a very astute observer," said Coppelia. "The trees defy common sense in a way quite similar to our being here."

"Huh?"

"I was joking." Coppelia sounded disappointed. "I fear this place will make less sense the more we see of it."

"Maybe," said Chrono, "or maybe the madness will coalesce into something more manageable."  
"How do you reason?"

"I don't," said Chrono. "But I have a friend who would say that all the time. She usually doesn't make much sense, but sometimes she says something I can understand. One of her favorite ideas is how when things don't make sense, they add up to a clue of sorts. She told me if I see everything in tidy order, I can't really say much about it, but if I see something disturbed—something I wouldn't expect to see—then there must be a reason why. By looking hard, I can find that reason."

"I understand," said Coppelia. "Have you ever followed her advice?"

"Many times. For example, I once lost a valuable rock called the Moon Stone. I found it again by looking at something out of the ordinary. In that case, it was a glowing house. That was the only thing different from how things were before I lost the Moon Stone, so I figured it should be my first stop."

"Is that so? Could something else not have caused the house to behave like that?"

"Well, it was a glowing rock, and it takes something strange like that to cause a house to light up like it's the Millennial Fair."

"I see your point," said Coppelia. "Your friend must be a genius on the order of the great Lucca Ashtear herself."

"She certainly sees it that way."

"Do you count yourself fortunate to have such friends as she?"

"That's kinda why I want to go home," said Chrono. "My friends, and Nadia."

"Such passion."

"I have to have passion. I have to have a reason to live and a reason to keep going with whatever I'm doing. Nadia is like that, too. On our journey, she believed in what she set out to do, and she helped the rest of us keep our goals in our hearts. I fought for others, certainly, but whether I would have admitted it or not back then, I fought mostly for Nadia."

Chrono spoke confidently, but he trailed off at the end. Talking about Nadia encouraged a fleeting vision of her to dance in front of his face. A memory of the Millennial Fair floated to the front of Chrono's mind. In it, Nadia—then called Marle—watched as he chugged several cans of soda, and then the two of them danced with some revelers dressed as cavepeople to the music of a "rock" band. Chrono had never established precisely when he fell in love with Nadia, but he never doubted that the Fair itself, as short and heavenly as it was, had been the point of no return. Nothing could have stopped him from wanting to be with Marle that day. Even then, Chrono would have risked his life for her, as he eventually did.

A rustling noise in the underbrush brought Chrono back into the present. Instinctively, he brought his sword into the ready position, and he waited for whatever made the sound to show itself. When it did, Chrono found himself face to face with not one, but two of the largest imps he had ever encountered. Immediately, each imp pulled a rock from behind its back and threw it at Chrono's head. Chrono dodged to his left and charged with his sword. Two quick slices later, one of the imps lay on the ground, lifeless. The other hopped back a step. For a second it looked like it would retreat, but instead of darting back into the trees, it pulled another rock from its pocket and threw it.

Chrono's instinct this time was to duck, though he had no need to. The rock flew to his left and landed harmlessly in the middle of the dirt path. Without stopping to size up the situation, Chrono dashed forward to take out the remaining imp. When he brought his sword down, though, the imp parried the blow with its forearms by folding them over its head and counterattacked with its feet. A swift double kick send Chrono sprawling backward on the ground.

Slightly dazed, Chrono's vision of Nadia reappeared behind the imp. As if drawn to Nadia's image by what Lucca would have called a magnet, Chrono sprang to his feet, charged the imp again, and faked a slash to its head before redirecting his sword to a point lower down on the target—its knees. That didn't kill it at once, but it left it defenseless against Chrono's finishing strike.

"That wasn't an ordinary imp," Chrono said to Coppelia. "Hey, did you see that?"

"I saw your fight, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia, "but you left no time for me to intervene. I counted fewer than five seconds between the start of the fight and your final attack. You appeared to have been strongly motivated to finish that battle quickly."

"I was," said Chrono. "I was thinking of Nadia."

"How did that help you?"

"I felt I had to get past them to see Nadia. When I think of it that way, it makes me stronger."

"I can not argue with your results, Mister Chrono."

"Don't you love your friends?"

"I would not say that."

"I would," said Chrono. "I mean, if I were you, I'd find it easy to say. You said you came here to find one of them, didn't you?"

"That is my mission, yes," said Coppelia.  
"Don't talk about it like it's your duty. It's not like you were made to be someone's servant. You're doing a good thing by coming here."

"I suppose that you are correct."

"And I suppose you're just as eager to see your friends as I am. And I'm sure they want to see you again, too."

"That I have reason to doubt," said Coppelia. "They prefer to keep me locked in a closet."

Chrono stiffened. "Is that another joke?"

"It is, indeed, Mister Chrono. Miss Orchid tells me constantly that I must learn to tell jokes. Do you sense something amiss with my sense of humor?"

"Don't be hard on yourself over that. The world is full of people who think they're funny but aren't. It's refreshing to meet someone who is the opposite." Briefly, the image of Nadia in Chrono's head replaced itself with an image of Lucca. Chrono shook his head until his imagination righted itself.

The two continued down the path in silence until the trees began to thin. Just when Chrono was about to guess how far they'd gone, he and Coppelia noticed the same thing at the same time.

"It's the end!" Chrono shouted first. Sure enough, as he rounded a corner, he could see a streak of light cut down the path from an opening in the trees a hundred yards or so ahead. Chrono took off at a sprint, eager to drink in the daytime like a long awaited meal after a fast.

"Mister Chrono, please slow down!" Coppelia called after him. "We must discuss something before we wander into the open like that."

Coppelia's voice broke Chrono's concentration, and he tripped on a tree root jutting out onto the path and tumbled onto his face. Pulling himself up quickly to salvage dignity, Chrono turned around and waved to Coppelia.

"Mister Chrono!" she called again. "Please look at your sword."

"I'm okay, really. It was just… my sword?"

"It glows."

Chrono glanced down, unsheathed his blade, and passed it to Coppelia. "Can you tell what's going on?"

"There is writing," said Coppelia. "I can read little characters glowing on the hilt. They are a bit messy, but I believe I can comprehend what is written."

"What does it say?"

"It appears to be a story. Do you wish for me to read it aloud?"

"Of course."

Coppelia held the sword close to her face with both of her hands. Squinting against the light at the end of the forest, she assumed her best narrative voice and read to Chrono a story called "The Dream of the Heavens":

XXX

Long ago, the King of the Dead, who oversaw all who came to the land to which all time would flow, found that his kingdom was prosperous and wealthy. He ruled his land with the help of his Eight Guardians: Plum Blossom, who governed the northwest; Cherry Blossom, who tended the northeast; Chrysanthemum, who reigned in the southeast; Bamboo, who handled the southwest; Yu the Fisherman in the north; Chiao the Woodcutter in the east; Keng the Farmer in the south; and Tu the Scholar in the west. This system of government worked admirably until the Calamity.

A new star appeared in the sky one day, and it shone bright enough to divide the heavens. When the star fell, the kingdoms of the Eight Guardians plunged into darkness and vanished into the depths of the other side of the sky. Try as he might, the King of the Dead could not bring back his friends the Guardians, so he was forced reluctantly to redivide the heavens into four new kingdoms and appoint new rulers over each area. In the north, he assigned his good friend Kuei; in the east, Lung; in the south, Feng; and in the west, Qilin. That is why the stars in the north are dark, the stars in the west are yellow, the stars in the south are red, and the stars in the east are blue. For many years, this setup pleased the King and his followers, and the star that split the heavens bothered no one.

The peace did not last. One day, Kuei ran into the Castle of Dreams and addressed the King: "My lord, my land has been invaded, and I am not powerful enough by myself to withstand the invasion."

"Tell me," said the King, "who is invading your land? Is it your neighbor, Qilin? Is it Qilin's brother, Hu?"

"Hu has been missing since the start of the invasion, my lord," Kuei answered, "and Qilin is not at fault. No, I believe the enemy is connected to the star that banished the Eight Guardians."

"This is troubling," said the King. "I believe I can handle things, however. Give me some time to call a council, and you shall have enough aid to prevent any further attacks."

"Thank you, my lord," Kuei said, and he left.

The King thought the problem over for a day and a night, never once leaving his chamber while he wrestled with how he could properly protect his vassals. When he emerged, he immediately called his top advisors for a meeting.

"My trusted servants," he said, "I have called you here to bring grave news. Kuei has reported that invaders have crossed into our realm once again. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you this, but nonetheless, the news does not surprise me. The star from long ago was an ill omen. Nothing can ever be completely right again while it is fallen, but we must not despair. There is a way to protect ourselves. I will summon the twelve greatest warriors from the four corners of our land, and they will take their places alongside Kuei, Qilin, Feng, and Lung. Together, they will protect us all from the merciless armies that plunged my kingdom into darkness in the past. Back then, I was unprepared, but now, I can think more clearly. I will not be caught unawares twice."

"My lord," said one advisor, "I do not see how you can choose the twelve best. There are millions out there, and if you take the time to examine each one, we will be overthrown."

"I have thought of that," said the King. "I wish to have warriors who are both brave and intelligent, so I have devised a test to pick those who best fit those criteria. Anyone wishing to become one of the chosen must cross the Sea of Sadness and fetch a budding rose from the bush on the Island of Paradise. Those capable of performing that task should report back to me for further instructions."

Messengers took the King's edict throughout the land, but the response was less than what the King expected. The Island of Paradise lay in the middle of a particularly dangerous stretch of water, and few dared challenge it, even in hopes of being named a special servant to the King of the Dead. All in all, only thirteen succeeded. Those thirteen were the Cat, the Dog, the Dragon, the Goat, the Horse, the Monkey, the Ox, the Phoenix, the Pig, the Rabbit, the Rat, the Snake, and the Tiger.

When those thirteen returned to the King with their rosebuds, they listened intently as the King gave another speech.

"Brave, valiant servants, you have done well to make it this far. And yet, I can only choose twelve, so that I can assign three to each direction. That is why you must now compete against each other in order to secure a place at the side of one of my vassals. The competition will be simple. You will again run a race, this time bringing back a peach blossom from the very same Island of Paradise. You will return as quickly as you can, and your order of finishing will determine who will serve in each position. Each vassal of mine has sent a representative to draw lots for the positions in the race. I will not reveal the results until you return, so you will not fight amongst yourselves during the contest. Simply return as fast as you can. Let it thus begin."

The King bowed at the end of his speech, signaling the start of the race. Immediately, all thirteen animals dashed for the Sea of Sadness. When they reached the water, some of the animals became afraid. A storm had swept upon the waters, rendering the path treacherous for all those animals forced to swim. The Snake found the most clever solution to his dilemma, attaching himself to the Horse's leg and making the Horse do the difficult work of swimming. The Monkey and the Goat begged the Phoenix to carry them. The Cat and the Rat rode on the back of the Ox. The Dragon flew, and the Dog and Pig swam. The Rabbit feared swimming too much to try and instead built a boat out of a tree felled by the storm. All of the animals made it safely to the Island of Paradise, but the storm refused to die before the trip back.

"Let us wait here for better passage," said the Pig to all of the others.  
"The King told us to hurry," said the Ox. "We must be strong enough to pull through the storm."

The rest agreed with the Ox, so everyone set off back across the raging sea. Just as they were about to reach land, however, a bolt of lightning startled the Rat. He shoved the Cat aside and jumped from the Ox's back to land, whereupon he sprinted for the castle in an effort to be the first in the race. The Cat fell under the water, and the waves swallowed him into the timestream, to be forever lost. The remaining eleven watched the Cat disappear before trudging sadly to the finish line.

The King greeted them warmly, but his smile faded when he saw them crying.

"What makes you so sad?" he asked them. "And where is the Cat?"

"The Rat pushed him into the water, and the waves took him," said the Snake. "The Rat was afraid of losing his position, you see."

The King became angry at the Rat, but the Rat begged for mercy. "My lord," he said, "I did not mean to push the Cat into the water. A bolt of lightning from the storm startled me, and I accidentally pushed off for land."

The King could not determine whose story was correct, so he grudgingly announced the results of the race. The Rat took first place, the Ox came in second, the Tiger third, the Rabbit fourth, the Dragon fifth, the Snake sixth, the Horse seventh, the Goat eighth, the Monkey ninth, the Phoenix tenth, the Dog eleventh, and the Pig twelfth. With the Cat not finishing the race, the rest of the competitors gained seats defending the heavens against the invaders, with the Snake, Horse, and Rooster serving Kuei, the Pig, Rat, and Ox serving Qilin, the Goat, Monkey, and Dog serving Feng, and the Tiger, Rabbit, and Dragon serving Lung. Thus order in the heavens was restored, and the invading forces were beaten back, thanks in large part to the cleverness of the Phoenix and Snake and the strength of the Horse. Now, whenever the heavens are threatened by any outside force sent by the fallen star, these twelve band together with the Four to restore peace.

XXX

"Interesting story," said Chrono. "Any guesses what it means?"

Coppelia shrugged. "It appears to be a legend or myth of some sort. While I have heard it in slightly altered form back on Earth, I must wonder if it was invented here. It seems to describe the origins of the current system of rulers and deities."

"I didn't see Jiao in there anywhere."

"She is a minor figure in history. These characters in the story may be nothing more than symbols representing other figures or, perhaps, dynastic lines. We can not be certain at this point."

"Any guess as to why it appeared now instead of earlier?"

"If that is all that is written on the stone, then I do not know, Mister Chrono. However, if there is more, then I have an idea. Perhaps the volume of information stored in magical form—the magical data, in other words—is so great that it could not all surface in readable form at once. In fact…."

As Coppelia spoke, the marks on the jade moved to form new letters, and those letters moved to form new words and sentences. Coppelia read them to Chrono:

A sea of sadness a thousand miles wide  
To leave your loved ones so far behind  
When you happened upon that otherworldly door  
And saw her waving from the distant shore  
Venture into worlds wild  
While looking back at her royal smile  
Do you still think your grief so great  
That others do not share your fate?  
Precious broken-hearted hour  
Right for those who're parted now  
Weep not, Nadia; I'll keep my vow

"It is a poem," said Coppelia.

Chrono raised an eyebrow. "Nadia?"


	12. Dreamstone

Chapter 11 – Dreamstone

Beyond the forest, the dirt path changed into something that was halfway between gravel and concrete. A light gray stream of rocks kept up the appearance of a path, while to both sides, the ground grew smooth and hard and black as midnight. The sky overhead went from green to deep purple, even though the sun shone almost directly overhead. Now and then, a dark cloud would obscure the sun. To either side of the path, hemming in the new area, there stood a wall a good twenty feet high, stretching off as far as the eye could see. Under the wall, in the distance off to the left, a sharp bank leading down to a river. Ahead down the path, the rock on the sides of the road gave way to patches of soil, in which grew grain and corn. Beyond the meager attempts at farmland there was a city.

Buildings made of dark stone barely distinguishable from most of the ground and the wall made for a skyline that appeared to be in silhouette even with the sun not behind it. Most of the buildings were of medium height. A few looked to be only a story tall, but the majority stood at least two, and a few reached higher still. The architecture looked like it belonged to no age in particular; everything was simple and functional, with no excess ornamentation intruding on the pervasive minimalism. The bare-bones design grew ever more apparent the closer Chrono and Coppelia came to the outskirts of the town. Chrono guessed the simplicity had something to do with the cost and labor necessary to carve a building out of rock.

Chrono might have recalled that most ornamental statues are carved out of rock, but his mind's attention belonged to the jade's poem, not the surroundings.

"Does this mean that Nadia is here somewhere?" Chrono asked Coppelia, almost as if he expected her to know.

"Perhaps the Nadia mentioned in the poem is not the Nadia you know, Mister Chrono," she answered. "Were you not the only one forced here?"

"I was," Chrono said, "but maybe she got sucked in, too. Maybe she ended up elsewhere."

"Gates usually do not send two travelers to different destinations except under extreme high energy circumstances, according to the Theorem of the Conservation of Time."

"You're probably right," said Chrono. "But that doesn't mean she didn't come in a different Gate."

"Jiao said she watches new arrivals. That someone from here could observe your time and know Nadia's name is not inconceivable."

"Maybe we're dealing with something magic, too. I sure hate magic, except when I find it useful. It just complicates things."

"Did you not assume some connection between the jade and magic when you saw it merge with your sword?"

Chrono winced. "I should have remembered that. I guess I'm not thinking too clearly right now."

"You seemed quite focused during the fight with those imps."

"That was because of Nadia. I fought for her. Now that I'm not fighting anything, my thoughts of her are taking over my mind and hurting my thinking."

"I see," said Coppelia. "Passion for a loved one is a double-edged sword."

"I wouldn't say that," said Chrono. "You make it sound as if the drawbacks and the benefits cancel each other out. What you leave out is how on a real sword, a skilled user can use both sides to his advantage. With love, the good far outweighs the bad in any situation."

"As you say that, you are blinded by your love for Nadia, but you just demonstrated one weakness of love. It can blind you."

"So they say."

"What occupies my mind now is not love."

"And you're expressing that by talking about love to me?"

Coppelia stopped walking. "Those imps we fought trouble me."

Chrono noted the change in Coppelia's tone and attempted to cheer her up by flexing his muscles and saying, "They're dead now. They shouldn't bother you anymore."

"I know that they are defeated, but I have never seen imps that skillful. Are they not supposed to be dumb creatures?"

"They are," said Chrono.

"If you think back to your battle, you might remember that one of them nearly turned the tables on you. You attempted to use the same strategy you used to dispatch the first imp against the second, and it anticipated your move and countered it. Never before have I seen a simple imp with the capacity to do that in the heat of battle."

Chrono scratched his head. "You know, neither have I, and I've seen lots of imps in my day. I hope this doesn't mean all the monsters here are stronger and smarter than anything I've encountered before. I'm always up for a challenge, but I don't want to die here."

Coppelia laughed. "If you fight like you did back there and against the cave monster, I do not think you have anything to worry about. My concern is for whether or not Miss Orchid can handle the dangers here."

Chrono shook his head. "I don't know one way or the other, but you have to be optimistic. If you didn't think she could survive, would you have bothered coming in the first place?"

"Mister Chrono, if you did not think Miss Nadia would survive a journey to an unknown land, would you still follow her?"

"I see your point. Still, I think you have a seed of optimism in you somewhere. Look to that. Even if it's just one tiny seed, it's still there. It can still grow into something bigger and more sustaining. It's just like a trip I once took."

"Where did you go?"

"I went to the future. Nadia came with me, and when we got there, we saw nothing but desolation. But it turned out that the one little seed of hope we found was enough to fix everything."

"I see," said Coppelia, who began walking again.

"Why did you… Look out!" Chrono pointed ahead to a figure cutting across the path. The newcomer looked only vaguely humanoid. It had a head and arms and feet, as well as a face and a tuft of hair crowing its scalp, but its head was too big for the rest of it. So was its mouth. Its legs appeared too small to support its bulk, but that didn't stop it from hopping along, showing no sign of noticing the two strangers.

"I've seen those things before," Chrono said. "I never really figured out what they were, but I know I've seen them."

"That is a Nu," said Coppelia.

"I know what they're called," said Chrono. "I just don't know _what_ they are. My understanding is that they show up all over time, from the millions of years in the past to what I call the present and on into the future. They mostly hide out in forests, and they're fierce fighters if you make them mad. I don't know what else to say about them, though."

"Neither do I," said Coppelia. "Even in my time no one has been able to determine just what manner of creature they are. I can not even say for sure whether or not they are native to Earth."

"They show up here, don't they? That's a good clue that there's something spooky about them. I never like the things, myself. They always gave me a queasy feeling, like something was poking me in the middle of my stomach over and over. They're just so weird. They're like a reminded that I don't know everything about the world, no matter how much of it I see. I _can't_ know everything about the world."

"That is an appropriate interpretation, Mister Chrono. I, however, view them as emblematic of the challenge to discover new knowledge, although I must confess that such a view originates with Miss Orchid. I am merely copying her opinion and passing it off as my own."

By the time the Nu vanished from sight off to the right, two more appeared ahead of Chrono and Coppelia. These two, like the first, didn't acknowledge either Chrono or Coppelia. They didn't even look at each other as they hopped off to the right.

Four more Nus appeared, two at a time, before Chrono and Coppelia finally reached town. When they did get there, the first thing they saw was the only bit flourish in the entire city's design, at least seemingly. In the middle of the town square, there stood a statue of a man in full armor. The helmet on his head looked like it was made out of scales, as did the flaps hanging down past his ears on either side. His face showed no expression. His right arm reached around his front to a scimitar hanging from his left hip. Tall military boots shielded his shins from whatever he was fighting. Below the statue itself there was a pedestal, and a plaque on the pedestal identified the carving as a statue of "Kuei the Tortoise."

Chrono very nearly commented on how whoever lived here at least had some sense of aesthetics, even if those aesthetics were rooted in militarism, or else on how the name "Kuei" had been showing up with some frequency lately, but before he could, he saw the second thing about the town that stood out: his sword began to glow again.

He gave it to Coppelia to read:

While this world in cradle lay  
Though naught but dreams its substance then  
It came to be one sleepy day  
Far back before one could say when  
With Heaven torn across its seams  
The quarter charred with flames of war  
This land, though dark, still sometimes gleams  
If you've the presence to look far  
And deep, to find the perfect glow  
A thing that shines can yet be low  
Eternal nocturne from a stone  
And endless flows the River Black  
In our fair world by hammer and light protected  
And guided by rich wisdom that we one day might go back  
To a time when war was not suspected

"Is this supposed to help us find our way around?" Chrono wondered. "Because it isn't. I can't make head nor tail out of it."

Coppelia pointed out the silver lining. "It is a pretty piece, is it not?"

"Does it tell us anything? This place is dark, butwe already knew that. Something about it shines, I think. I have no idea if that's literal or metaphorical or what."

"Might a local help us interpret what we have read?"

Chrono felt the wind drain from his protest's sails. Reluctantly, he agreed. "Yeah, maybe. Whom should we ask?"

"I do not know," said Coppelia. "I recommend you lead the way."

Chrono looked around the square. Paths led off in four directions, counting the one from which they originally came. Two of the other three went deeper into town, while the one directly across from their entrance quickly exited and seemed to carry on down to the river. Chrono decided to pick one of the other two, so he looked either way to see if he could spot any sign of life.

He found his efforts rewarded when he noticed a few people—actual humans, he hoped—walking through the streets. Why no one bothered to come by the square, he couldn't guess, but distant people were better than no people. Chrono pointed to the left and half walked, half jogged toward the first person he could run down.

"Excuse us," he said to a thickly-mustached man carrying a pot on top of his head. "We're new here, and we don't really know our way around. We were wondering if you have seen someone called Orchid. Can you help us?"

"New, huh?" said the man. "Try talking to Paem over at her shop. She's the one who handles new arrivals."

"Really? Thanks," Chrono said. "You've been very helpful."

"Think nothing of it," said the man. "You might not know this, but we get lost people here all the time."

"Could one of the lost people have been Miss Orchid?" Coppelia asked.

"Can't say, miss," said the man. "You're really going to have to talk to Paem about that. If your Orchid has been through here, she would have gone to see Paem anyway, I reckon."

"Thank you again," said Chrono.

The man pointed further down the street. "She's right over there. You can't miss her."

Decorations down this street were slightly less sparse than they appeared at a distance, but that wasn't saying much. Pretty much everything was as plain as it could have been, but apparently some distinguishing characteristics were necessary for attracting business to a shop. In other words, Paem's building had a little marquee hanging over the front door, with "Paem's Fortunes" written across it in block letters.

Chrono knocked on the door. A voice from inside responded by telling him to come right in because she wasn't busy. Chrono obliged by opening the door.

Stepping into "Paem's Fortunes" was like stepping into (yet another) different world. The dominant color of the interior was actually something other than black; red light danced across the stone walls and played around on red lengths of silk hanging down from the ceiling. A red carpet welcomed them and showed them the way to the back of the room, where a young woman sat at a rosewood desk. The woman wore a red skullcap and a set of rich black clothes. Red light glanced off her dark eyes and stained her black hair. Her face was as pale as any Chrono had seen before, dotted with a speck of red near the bottom that he suspected was her lips. Sitting on the desk in front of her, on top of a red placemat, was a round, red rock, which slowly rotated, allowing the woman at the desk to see all sides of it.

The light in the room all came from the rock.

"Is that what I think it is?" said Coppelia.

"That's Dreamstone," said Chrono. "And it's the biggest piece of it I've ever seen."

The young woman smiled upon hearing this.


	13. Prediction

Chapter 12 – Prediction

"You seek your fortune." The young woman at the desk beckoned with her finger for Chrono and Coppelia to come closer. "I see it in your eyes. I see through you into your hearts. This much I can read right away."

Coppelia frowned. "Do you read this on our hearts, or do you assume that two people walking into a fortune telling business are there to inquire about fortune telling services?"

"I, Paem, can read this on your hearts. If I could not, then would I have attained such fame for my skills?"

Coppelia turned her nose toward the ceiling in what Chrono guessed was the first defiant gesture she had made since they met. "Plenty have achieved fame without the aid of clairvoyance. I see no reason to reject my hypothesis."

"And to be honest," Chrono butted in, "we're here more for general information about this town, and we'd like to know if someone we're looking for has been through here. Though now that we're here, I can't help but wonder about your Dreamstone. Isn't that stuff supposed to be really, really rare?"

"If you ask me your questions one at a time," said Paem, "I may be able to answer them. That is what I am here for, after all. Please, tell me what you want to know."

Coppelia wasted no time with her question. "We would like to know if you have seen or heard anything about Miss Orchid, my friend."

Paem directed her gaze at the Dreamstone on the tabletop and began chanting. A sentence or two into her chant, she shut her eyes and raised her hands to either side of the Dreamstone, palms inward. Her palms began to emit a warm red light, and the Dreamstone rotated slowly in place. Paem sped up her chant, and the rotation sped up accordingly. After thirty second of this, Paem fell silent, the light faded from her hands, and the Dreamstone slowed to a stop. Only when everything was still and normal did Paem open her eyes again.

"The Black Wind howls," she said. "You shall have your answer. Your friend Orchid passed this way some time ago, but she is now gone. Where she went, I cannot say."

Chrono almost laughed, but he caught himself and pretended to sneeze. When he recovered, he asked, "Aren't fortunes supposed to be about the future?"

"Do you know where you are, asking of such things as the future?" Paem replied. "Future, past, present—all are meaningless here."

"Yes, yes," said Chrono. "I know from a theoretical standpoint time we're beyond time, but from a practical standpoint, why can you only tell us that Orchid used to be here? Why can't you tell us where she is now?"

"You ask a difficult question," said Paem, "and I myself am not wise enough to know the answer. At least, I am not certain of the answer."

"Am I to assume that you are not an oracle, contrary to what you said a mere couple of minutes ago?" Coppelia asked.

Paem glared. "I can learn much from the Dreamstone, but I do not have control over what is knowable and what is not knowable. In this case, I know that your friend is no longer here."

Chrono scratched his head. "Do you ever make predictions, or are you better with maintaining a storehouse of knowledge?"

"I wouldn't say either," said Paem. "I usually do better with knowing things that are certain, and the certainty of predictions is very limited. Explaining why would be difficult unless you know more about Dreamstone than I think you do. Suffice it to say that I can make predictions under certain very limited conditions."

XXX

A.D. 2305

"Predicting is difficult business," Samsara Ashtear announced to Jinling while hardly breaking stride in her quest to finish her toast and eggs. A few rays of light from the new day's sun crept in through the dining room window, signaling the beginning of a new day of wonders for most of the world—and the end of a long night of work for Samsara.

"Sam," said Jinling, "you look like a train wreck. When was the last time you slept?"

Samsara ignored her friend's protest. "Have you ever looked at the newest model I've drawn up yet? It's insane."

Jinling took a sip of her orange juice and rubbed her eyes before answering. "Is it like the others?"

"Yeah, I need something easier," said Samsara. "This one is too precise. I can't predict it. It's chaotic."

"Chaotic?"

"I keep forgetting that I'm the mathematician here. Chaotic."

"I know what it means. I just don't like dealing with dynamical systems before my morning coffee."

Samsara continued anyway. "Obviously, my manifold is dense. But when I try to predict travel on a manifold like that, I get trajectories that diverge exponentially. Exponentially!"

"I told you that before you started," said Jinling. "What, have you been up all night confirming something that everyone has known for a hundred years?"

"There has to be a way around it," said Samsara. "There has to be. I won't accept defeat!"

"Wanna show me how bad it is?"

Samsara dug into her purse, pulled out a notebook, opened it, and pointed to a recent sketch. "So glad you asked."

The image was of a small circle labeled 'U' and a larger circle labeled 'f(U).' The larger circle filled nearly the whole page.

"U is the starting set, roughly encompassing a region corresponding to the precision of our instruments. f(U) is the image of U. You see what the problem is, right?"

Jinling took a bite out of her toast and nodded. "I see. Your trajectories diverse quite emphatically. Congratulations. You're working in phase-space, right?"

"Of what practical use is this model, then? What good is it if I can't make predictions?"

"You said it was chaotic, but have you shown it is topologically transitive?"

"It looks like it is, doesn't it?"

"You haven't shown that."

"I'm pretty sure it is."

"If you say so." Jinling finished her toast and took a swig of coffee. "Not that it matters anyway."

Samsara set her head in her hands. "This is all such a pain. Maybe Balthasar made a mistake somewhere. Maybe I just haven't found it yet."

"You're going to worry yourself to death if you keep it up," said Jinling. "Really, you're not doing your research any favors by pulling all-nighters. Go get some sleep, and then we can think things through later today. I'm going for a walk."

"Let me grab a bagel first," said Samsara.

"Take it back to your room if you have to. Just get yourself to bed. You're going to burn out if you spend another minute in here, ranting about your mathematical difficulties, instead of in there, sleeping. Please."

Samsara snatched a bagel from the bowl in the middle of the table. She took a bite out of it and stared at the space where the bite had been. Her eyes widened, and she dashed off down the hallway to her study room.

Jinling watched her run out, downed the rest of her coffee, sighed, and went to fetch her coat.


	14. Himmelkreuz

Chapter 13 – Himmelkreuz

"Limited conditions?" Chrono scratched his head. "Why does everyone in this place have to remind me of Lucca, and not in a good way? Could you please try to explain yourself?"  
"Gladly," said Paem. "But I cannot do that here. I would be more satisfied if I could show you instead, and I believe you would be more satisfied, as well."

"Does this mean, Paem" said Coppelia, "that you will make a small prediction and then verify it in order to demonstrate that you can indeed predict the future under some controlled conditions? I do not believe such a demonstration would answer our query. We would like to know why, not if."

Paem smiled. "That is what I will show you. To understand why predictions do not always work, you need to know where they come from. And they don't come from here."

"They don't come from your Dreamstone?" Chrono asked.

"They do not. They only go through it. Such is the path of the flow of knowledge in this land. It flows from Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom, down to us through the Himmelkreuz. From there, it disperses itself to those who know how to attain it. Dreamstone can absorb this knowledge and transmit it to skilled individuals. That is because Dreamstone is ultimately, I believe, a piece of Sophia. This is far from certain, and no one knows for sure, but it is what I believe, at least for now. But that does not really answer your question. Please, follow me if you desire better understanding."

Paem pulled a large staff out from under her desk before getting up to lead Chrono and Coppelia out the door. The staff was made of a rich scarlet colored wood in the center, with an ebony snake coiled around it. The snake's head jutted out from the tip, menacingly baring its fangs at wherever Paem pointed it. Chrono thought the aesthetics of it looked a little too similar to something Magus would have liked, but he did not point this out to anyone.

Paem led Chrono and Coppelia back to the center of town, past the statue, and from there she took them down the path to the river. As they went, the buildings lining the road thinned out, leaving nothing but the barren black earth for scenery. More Nus crossed their path from time to time, and like before, not a one of them paid any attention to the travelers or their guide. They appeared to be the only thing alive beyond the outskirts of the town, at least nearby.

Chrono could see the river ahead of them once no more buildings blocks his line of sight. It was too far away for him to discern just how wide or how rough it was, but he could tell it was more than a trivial stream. He could all tell that it widened into a full-blown lake at one point. Their current path seemed to be leading them toward that lake more than toward the river proper.

The river showed more signs of civilization around it than the stretch between there and the town. Off to the left, there was a small cluster of buildings next to a ferry dock. To the right, on top of the lake, the road they were presently walking turned into a bridge, and as it went onward, it eventually met an island in the middle of the lake. On that island stood a tall, black tower. The tower just barely stood out against the dark sky, but the air around it glowed a deep red.

Paem pointed at the tower. "That is our destination. Once we arrive there, I can show you some of the wonders of this land, and I might even have a better answer for your question about your friend Orchid."

"What is inside that tower?" Coppelia asked.  
"It's really much easier to see than to hear," Paem replied. "As I told you before, you'll have to wait and see."

The bridge was longer and wider than it appeared at a distance. Fortunately, Chrono thought, it was sturdier than most. He much preferred carved stone to the flimsy woodwork of Zenan Bridge. The bridge, the island, and the tower were all made of the same black stone. Up close, the air looked even more red, and it became clear that the colored light came from some of the tower's windows.

"What's this place called?" Chrono asked.

Paem answered, "Around here, we usually just call it The Tower. Technically, it has many different names, including the North Tower and the Black Tower and Kuei's Tower. Some even just call it Himmelkruez, but that is really what's inside it more than the building itself."

"What is Himmelkruez?" Coppelia asked.

"It's what we're here to see." Paem approached the huge double doors at the base of the tower and raised her staff to a small silver box hanging just below eye level in the middle of the right door. The mouth of the snake on the staff sparkled red for a second, and then with a loud metallic crash, the doors swung inward.

"You just opened a lock, did you not, Miss Paem?" said Coppelia. "You must be an important person to be allowed to enter such a facility."

"I am not," said Paem. "I hold no position of power or governance. I merely have access to this place because of my line of work."

"Because you're a fortune teller," said Chrono. "And this tower is somehow connected to fortunes."

"That is correct," said Paem. "My job is very technical and requires me to keep my equipment fresh. I come here fairly often."

"Quite the commute," Chrono laughed. "I hope it isn't _too_ often."

Paem blushed. "I became accustomed to the walk long ago. It no longer bothers me. In any case, let's save further talk for once we get to Himmelkreuz."

Once everyone stepped inside the tower and cleared the swinging radius of the front gates, the gates shut themselves, and the room grew dark. Pitch dark.

"I can't see," said Chrono. "Where did the light go?"

"Mister Chrono, do you not still have Disenchantment's light?" Coppelia's voice asked. "Perhaps it can guide us, though I suspect our current guide has a solution for our darkness problem. If not, I can provide one."

"That's right!" said Chrono. "I think I put it away after we escaped the cave. Maybe I can dig it out of my pocket. Ah… got it!"

Chrono held up the orb of light that had served him so well in Jinling Caverns, and immediately he found himself able to see most of the ground floor of the tower, or what there was to see. The walls and floor and ceiling were all the same black rock as everything else, and there was no decoration anywhere in the room. If not for the passagesways leading out, the whole chamber would have been indistinguishable from a cave.

The view did not last long. As soon as the orb left Chrono's hands, it took off under its own power, floating to the back of the room toward a stairwell, where it flew up and disappeared, leaving him in the dark again.

"That is an interesting device," Paem noted. "Where did you get it?"

"I got it from someone named Disenchantment," said Chrono. "She gave it to me when we got separated back in the caverns. It helped me get out of there in one piece. Actually, it rescued both of us. Coppelia was lost, too, and she was the one who figured out how the thing worked."

Paem shrugged. "I should have liked to see more of it, but it's gone now. We don't need it, though. I know this place better than anyone alive or anyone dead. Each of you, grab one of my hands, and I shall lead you directly. It's… probably better if you don't see everything we're passing by, anyway."

"Wonderfully designed building," Chrono muttered. "You'd think someone would have thought to put in a window or two."

"We could see windows on the outside," observed Coppelia, "but we cannot from in here. That is a curious fact."

"This place just keeps getting better," said Chrono. "Fine, Paem, lead us."

Paem took their hands and pulled them along to the stairs at the back. They ascended three flights, and then they left the stairwell for a side room, which was still pitch dark.

Chrono laughed. "Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Paem told us we'd be better off seeing rather than hearing before bringing us _here_?"

"Do not scoff," said Paem. "Your eyes require light, and you shall have light." She let go of their hands. "Behold!"

Paem struck the floor with her staff, and the walls lit up. They only lit up with a dreary red color similar to the air around the outside of the castle, but after so much darkness, even it was enough to make Chrono shield his eyes. Coppelia somehow managed to stare unblinkingly at the walls.

"Red lines?" she said. "Did you bring us all this way to show us some shining red lines on the walls of a dark room, or is this a trap?"

"This is not a trap at all," said Paem. "Not in the least. This is a viewing room for the mysteries of Himmelkreuz. This is font of the Wisdom of Sophia."

"You're making no sense," said Chrono. "Weren't you going to show us what all these fancy words mean?"

"Watch," said Paem. "I shall ask Sophia a question, and she will give me an answer."  
Paem said a short chant and finished by tapping her staff against the floor again. When she did, the light around the edge of the room began to flicker, and an unbearably loud groaning noise, like the grinding of a gigantic set of gears, spewed out from the walls. The room shook, and Chrono found himself on the floor covering his ears to keep from going deaf.

The commotion lasted about ten seconds, after which everything quieted back down to dim red light and a faint humming noise. Paem then turned her staff around and looked straight into its mouth. The same red light from the walls shone out of the staff and into Paem's face, and she closed her eyes.

"The answers to my question are 2299 and… 982. This is unusual. I didn't expect that. Are you sure you've been traveling together? I asked the machine for your birth years."

"Machine?" said Chrono.

"We are from different times," said Coppelia. "We only met after we arrived here. I hope this satisfies your curiosity."

"It still strikes me as strange," said Paem. "In any case, that's how this works. It's sort of like…."

"It greatly resembles an advanced supercomputer," said Coppelia. "Himmelkreuz is a machine for transmitting knowledge from the entity you call Sophia, which is likely also supercomputer. The tower itself is a storage medium, and at the top is a transmitter for beaming the information to the Dreamstone in your office. You aren't divining the future; you are looking it up on a computer."

"Brava," said Paem. "I guess you have similar things in your time. That doesn't mean you're completely right, though. Computers are…."  
"Computer don't even exist in my time," said Chrono. "Let's try to keep things simple, okay? Lucca talks about this sort of thing way too much already, and it gives me a headache because she never explains the basics first. I can't follow all the details without covering the basics, can I?"

"Mister Chrono," said Coppelia, "a computer is a device for performing calculations. It will take in a number written in some form, and it will perform operations on the number to turn it into a different number. If you use the right numbers, you can put them in an order to let them describe a picture or a song. Pictures work by coming up with numbers for squares on a grid and colors for those squares, and sounds work by break the song down mathematically into easier numbers. Sound is a wave, but there is an easy way to describe the wave in terms of an infinite series of trigonometric functions that can be truncated…."

"You're losing me again," said Chrono. "I think Lucca only gets it because she spent all that time in the future when all this stuff had already been invented."

"I apologize, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. "I sometimes become too excited when I speak on these matters. Suffice it to say that a computer is a device that can take in information, store it, and then return the information either to a user, to a screen, to an audio device, or to some other format. It can also store the information. This tower stores vast quantities of information, which Miss Paem calls the Wisdom of Sophia. I do not yet know how the Sophia supercomputer obtains its information, but I suspect the predictions the computer here makes are the result of educated guesses given what information it has. It can then transmit likely future outcomes to Miss Paem."

"I'm impressed," said Paem. "You are a smart one, but there is much that neither of us knows about Himmelkreuz and Sophia. I cannot presume to be able to fill you in on every detail, but I can tell you that I don't know what Sophia is. We in this land have always worshipped her as a goddess, and we greatly value the wisdom she provides. Without it, we would have perished long ago. I can also tell you that your computer analogy, while close, does not quite account for some of the peculiarities or our system. Most computers run on copper and silicon, correct?"

Coppelia nodded. Chrono shrugged.

"There are some variants in times ahead of your time, but that is the basic idea. One constructs electrical circuits and other instruments for processing and storing data. Himmelkreuz, however, was not constructed. It draws from the Wisdom of Sophia and stores it in the walls. We had to find a way to extract it, but we didn't design the mechanism for putting it there. Ultimately, we don't know where that came from. Also interesting is that we don't have to design devices for interpreting the Wisdom of Sophia. Can you guess why?"

"I cannot," Coppelia admitted with a shamed expression on her face.

"Anything made of the right material can do so," said Paem. "Anything made out of…."

"Dreamstone," said Chrono. "It's the Dreamstone, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Paem. "No one knows why, except that we think Dreamstone is a piece of Sophia herself."

"Is this the same Dreamstone as we have on Earth, then?" Chrono asked. "Because on Earth, we believe it has a different origin."

"Miss Orchid told me of this," said Coppelia. "It is believed that Dreamstone comes from the entity known as Lavos, is it not?"

"How old is Sophia?" Chrono asked.

"Older than time," said Paem. "Older than everything beyond time. Older than everything, including Lavos. Hmm, Lavos. It has been many years since I've heard that word."

"It was sort of a big deal back on Earth," said Chrono.

"Even records here are disorganized," said Paem. "I mentioned that we do not put the wisdom into the machine, but I haven't yet told you that we have to mine it from the ground."

"You mine it?" said Coppelia.  
"Yes, we dig up Dreamstone from the ground and bring it to the tower. From there, we can more easily scan it and read it. If we find empty Dreamstone, we bring it back here anyway so Himmelkreuz can write new knowledge into it if it predicts something important."

Coppelia let out a yelp and hopped up off her feet. She seemed slightly embarrassed as she recomposed herself. "Do you think that information about Miss Orchid may be buried in the ground somewhere? Will you eventually know where she went?"

"I might," said Paem. "But I might not know for a long time. I might not ever know. The system is quite useful when it works, but it often only works when we need it most."

"When is that?" said Chrono.

"It tells us when someone is attacking," said Paem. "That's my real job, you know. Forget what I said earlier. You don't think I'd be allowed in here if I were just a fortune teller, do you, Hero of Time?"

"Well, no, but… what did you call me?"

"Yes, Mister Chrono, what did she call you?"

"N-nothing," said Chrono. "I think she's all confused again. I did some time traveling, but I'm no hero."

Paem shook her head. "I thought for sure you must have been in order to know of Lavos, but I can't very well keep tabs on all the billions and billions of people through the ages, can I?"

"She has a point, though, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. "How do you know of Lavos?"  
"I'm a time traveler," said Chrono. "I've seen lots of things. Computers, jet bikes, the Guru of Time, crazy robots…."

Coppelia frowned. "Mister Chrono, you continue to amaze me."

"All I want now is to see Nadia. I've seen lots of amazing and wonderous things throughout the history of our little planet, but Nadia is still the most amazing of them all. If only you could meet her!"

"You see, Miss Paem," said Coppelia, "he is intensely devoted. We both will not give up until we find those for whom we are searching, though our motivations differ. You can see why we wish to know if this supercomputer can tell us anything."

Before Paem could answer, the lights in the room brightened and the grinding noise from the walls restarted. This time, the a loud siren accompanied the other noises, and the rock walls themselves flashed red on and off in a steady rhythm. Paem's face turned fierce.

"Come with me," she said. "If you are any good at all in a fight, come with me."

"What is going on?" asked Chrono.

"Himmelkreuz is telling me that we have invaders."

XXX

A.D. 2305

"Sam," said Jinling Lan between a bit of a juicy pear she was having as a side dish with her pork cutlet and a swig of raspberry-cranberry juice, "I think you'd have twice as many papers if you didn't spend so much time with your computers. You're a mathematician, you know."

"Theoretical computer science _is_ mathematics," said Samsara, nibbling at her salad. "I like both fields, and I have a knack for both. Temporal mathematics and computer mathematics."

"It's because of your mother, isn't it?" said Jinling. "It must be fun having a famous circuit named after you. As far as I know, there isn't anything important named after the Lan family, at least not computer related."

"Knowing your habits, you'll probably get your name attached to a video game network or something."

Jinling stuffed a crab puff into her mouth, chewed it quickly, and swallowed it, all within ten seconds. "Work hard, play hard. That's how it goes. You only seem to have half of that figured out."

"I prefer to work hard and then relax when the work is done."

"And when is that? I don't think I've ever seen you sitting around and talking about how your work is done. The day after you finished college you went right back to work on one of your little side projects."

Samsara rinsed her salad down with a sip from her glass of water. Finding herself without an adequate reply, she quickly stabbed another lettuce leaf with her fork, shoveled it into her mouth, and began chewing loudly.

"Well?" said Jinling.

"Hmmph hmmph hmmp!" Samsara mumbled.

"Fine, I get it," said Jinling. "You're quite the character, Sam. I'm sure I've told you that before."

Samsara swallowed and took another sip of water. "You've got dreams of surpassing Balthasar, so I would think you would know what it feels like. Right?"

"That's your dream too, Sam."

"But the Ashtear Circuit is just the beginning for advanced artificial intelligence. It was the major breakthrough, and Mother was a genius and all, but I know I can do even better. At the very least I owe it to her to build something with her invention."

Jinling laughed at this and nearly spit a crab puff out onto her plate. "Why not do something useful and build a better Wondershot ray gun? I'd buy one."

"That was a one-shot invention," said Samsara, "and it relied a little bit too much on a one-of-a-kind power source. Anyone could have come up with it these days."

"Only an Ashtear could have an entire branch of science named after her and still not be satisfied. Oh well. Just relax once in a while and save your strength for our physics work, okay?"

"Computers are a different kind of interesting, though," said Samsara. "With physics, it's all about looking for the underlying rules that govern everything. We can describe the way planets move with simple equations. Computers are a completely different intellectual meal. You know how you're eating both pork and fruit? Well, I need both my physics math and my computer math. With the computers, I build up complicated systems that can't be described so simply, and it do it using simple algorithms implemented iteratively. It's just like looking at a cell. Everything a cell does follows local rules, but you can't tell what a human body is just by looking at a cell and thinking really hard. You have to look at a whole body and see how the cells work together. Even something completely mindless and undirected can give birth to something seemingly complex. It's amazing, and it's so different from just about everything else. It's a new kind of challenge. In a way, it lets my brain rest when I'm tired from working on my temporal mathematics."

Jinling leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. "You certainly love what you do. Just don't go abandoning our collaborative work."

"I have no intention of that. I am every bit as passionate about Balthasar's work as I am about my mother's."

"Good. Then will you join me in a game of racquetball after dinner?"

"I can't," said Samsara. "I was going to go play with my computer."


	15. Crow

Chapter 14 – Crow

The trip back to the ground floor of the Tower was much easier than the trip up; with all of the walls flashing red, light was no longer an issue, so Paem did not have to lead Chrono and Coppelia along. The route was fairly direct, so they dashed down the stairs at top speed and made their way to the gate. Paem opened up the gate with her staff, and she ran out onto the bridge. Chrono and Coppelia followed, and what they saw in front of them surprised them both.

Out in the middle of the open waters of the lake, Chrono saw a huge, red Gate. It had no hint of the usual bluish tint most Gates had. It was a mass of pure, swirling red. Coming out of the Gate, rising out of the sea like a mythological leviathan, was a massive ship. Its majestic sails flew far higher than the Tower; its bulk was as solid as a mountain; its deck was as smooth and flawless as a beach left undisturbed for centuries by everything but the tides; and on its bow there stood an unimaginably grotesque figurehead that looked like a terrible cross between a dragon and an imp. Standing on the bow was a man in a red cloak with a white mask over his face. Behind him stood a woman in a tight purple dress and a pair of darker purple wings, her face twisted into a murderous expression and her hands clutching twin daggers. Next to her there was another man in a long gray cloak but no mask. A brown scarf covered the lower half of his face, and a wide-brimmed hat obscured most of the rest, but his eyes peered through the gap between the two. He carried a large hook in his right hand.

"Three of them?" Paem shouted. "I thought there were two. Something is wrong."

"Are they familiar at all?" Chrono called to her.

"The two in back are, but their leader is not. Never seen him before. This could be really bad."

The man in the red cloak spotted Paem and pointed at her. Chrono, Coppelia, and Paem all stopped running as the ship turned its port side toward the bridge, pushing up in front of it a wave of black water that crashed up onto the bridge and lapped at Chrono's feet. Shortly, with a flash, a yellow magical platform materialized between the bridge and the ship, an otherworldly boarding plank. The three figures at the head of the ship walked slowly over to the plank. Ahead of them poured an army of uniformed imps wielding scimitars.

"I see you have a sword, Chrono," said Paem. "I hope you are good with it."

Chrono drew his weapon. "No worries there."

"Mister Chrono, Miss Paem," said Coppelia, "I wish you luck."

"Here is where I tell you not to worry," Paem whispered, just loudly enough to be heard.

The battle commenced when the first squadron of imps charged Paem. She did not flinch. Instead, she chanted for a second and watched as a shadowy snake figure burst from her staff and struck the imps with its fangs, knocking them down through the magical plank and into the water below. They disappeared with a splash. The next squadron angled its course away from Paem and toward Coppelia. She met them with a lightning fast retreat followed by a dash from the side and a pummeling with her fists. The lead imp went flying into those behind it, and Coppelia gave chase, continuing to pound them until they all fell over the brink into the lake. A third squadron took aim at Chrono, but he easily parried the blows from their swords and hit them with a lightning spell. The entire squadron vaporized before his eyes.

Chrono yelled up at the deck: "You can send these guys all day and we aren't even going to break a sweat. Come down and fight us!"

The man in the red cloak laughed and waved his hand, sending a fireball hurtling at Chrono. Chrono batted it away with his sword and turned his attention back to the imps.

"I guess we're going to have to kill all them, then," he said.

"These are just to tire us out," said Paem. "The ones remaining on the ship are far stronger."

Chrono tightened his grip on his sword. "Then I'll hold back a little. No reason to waste all my energy on imps, even if they do have fancy uniforms. Who are those other guys, anyway?"

Paem shook her staff above her head and called forth an explosion of shadow to ward off a group of imps before she replied. "The lady in purple is an assassin known as Plum Blossom. She is quick and deadly. The man in the hat is a sorceror called Yu the Fisherman. He snares his opponents' souls with magic and tears their bodies asunder with his hook. It is not something you wish to see."

"I'm almost sorry I asked," said Chrono. "Still, I have no intention of losing to them."

"Please be careful," said Paem.

When the last imp fell into the lake (courtesy Coppelia), Chrono looked back at the man in red. "You're out of imps, are you?"

Chrono received no reply. Instead, he heard a rumbling as a hatch to the lower decks burst open and a new group of pirate demons charged all at once for Chrono and his friends. These, however, were not imps.

"Reptites?" said Chrono. "Where did they come from?"

"Never mind what they are," said Paem. "Just get ready. These are tougher."

"I've faced them before," said Chrono. "I'm not worried."

In fact, Chrono found the next wave of attackers even easier to fend off than the first; his lightning magic startled and stunned the Reptites _en masse_, enabling his companions to slaughter the few that survived each blast. Coppelia got the idea to break pieces of the bridge off from the ground and hurl them at distant targets, making the Reptites' progress even more difficult. The entire wave of them perished before any could cross the boarding plank.

With the Reptites gone, the man in red actually applauded.

"Well done, Paem," he said in a voice that sounded very human yet very sinister. "I didn't think you had it in you to win by yourself, but I guess you found some new friends."

"New friends?" said Chrono. "What's he talking about?"

Paem blinked. "Sajo and Mal? What have you done with them?"

"We've distracted them," the man said. "If they even survive, they won't be around to trouble us until we're completely finished here. They won't be coming to your rescue. Your pitiful substitution for them will not be able to save you. I'll have your key now."

Chrono's face flushed with anger. "Pitiful? You call that pitiful? You sound like a sore loser."

The man laughed again. "We haven't lost. We've only just begun the first step in our conquest. Surely you don't think the scum we've already thrown at you represents even a minute fraction of our military might, do you? You've got to be even dumber than I thought. Soon I'll have the Golems, and then I'll have it all!"

"Golems?" said Chrono.

"The Golems are our miners," said Paem. "I'll tell you more after this battle."

"Golem miners? That's a new one." Chrono readied his sword.

"Who are you, anyway?" Paem shouted at the man. "It's usually just those two punks."

"I am a man of many talents," he replied. "For now, you can call me Crow, the Angel of Death."

"Should not a crow be dressed in black, not red?" Coppelia taunted.

"This cloak is red like the blood I spill," said Crow. "You do bleed red, don't you?"

Coppelia clenched her fist and glared at Crow. "If you wish to know that, you should come down here and fight with us."

"My warriors will have at it first," said Crow.

With that, Plum Blossom stepped out onto the plank. Yu followed her, floating about a foot off the ground.

"Let's stay back a ways," said Paem. "You don't want one of these guys doing to you what we did to the imps. It's a long way down to the water, and it's even farther back to dry land."

Plum Blossom attacked first. She leaped into the air, spread her wings, and glided across to the bridge. When she was directly above Chrono, she dove for him. Chrono managed to flip out of her way, half expecting her to crash into the ground, but she turned herself over, landed gracefully, and charged without even stopping to balance herself. Before Chrono could ready a counter maneuver, however, Coppelia kicked Plum Blossoms's legs out from under her and sent her sprawling.

Meanwhile, Yu sent a blast of magical energy flying for Paem, who had been watching his chant and anticipating the attack; she blocked it with a reflection spell and sent it back at him. What she failed to anticipate was that he would cast another reversal and send the spell in a third direction. Paem barely had time to shout a warning before the attack struck Coppelia square in the middle of her back and sent her rolling on her side over to the far edge of the bridge.

Chrono saw Plum Blossom's temporary incapacitation as an opening, so he went into the start of his Confusion Technique. He took a deep breath and circled around his opponent, engaging in a mad flurry of feints with four actual strikes mixed in. Plum Blossom managed to spring back to her feet fast enough to catch Chrono's hands, with the intention of plunging a dagger into them, but Chrono reacted by kicking her in the side and sending the both of them flying in opposite directions.

Chrono landed awkwardly and lay still for a few dangerous seconds, but Plum Blossom redirected her attention to Coppelia, who was in even more dire straits. She hadn't yet recovered from Yu's attack, and suddenly she had Plum Blossom bearing down on her. Just before Plum Blossom struck, however, Coppelia stood up on her hands, kicked her feet above her and planted both of them in Plum Blossom's torso. This didn't slow Plum Blossom down, but it won Coppelia enough leverage to flip back onto her feet and into a position to dodge.

"Have you seen Miss Orchid?" she asked her opponent.

"Insolent!" Plum Blossom hissed. "You talk to me in the midst of battle?"

"Have you seen Miss Orchid?" Coppelia repeated. "I must ask everyone, even those who wish me harm. I have lost her, and I must find her again."

"I doubt you really know Orchid," said Plum Blossom. "She never mentions you."

Coppelia stopped. "You know her, then? Mister Chrono, Plum Blossom the Assassin says she knows Miss Orchid."

Chrono ran over to Coppelia and smacked Plum Blossom across the back with the hilt of his sword. "If you know something, you'd better tell us."

"Fools!" Plum Blossom shrieked, and she batted Chrono's hand away with her wings and somersaulted behind Coppelia.

Without even looking, Coppelia hopped backward and kicked Plum Blossom in the face. Dizzy, Plum Blossom hobbled back and attempted to steady herself. Coppelia used the opening to tear the daggers away from her and hold them up to her throat.

"If you must know," said Plum Blossom, "Orchid is preparing an assault on the western desert. It's too late to stop her. She'll be gone before you can even get there. Does that make you happy?"

"An… assault?" Coppelia let her voice trail off. She landed a blow to Plum Blossom's head, knocking her unconscious, and she stuck the spoils of the battle—the daggers—into her belt.

"We're good over here!" Chrono shouted at Paem.

"We are… oh, Miss Paem!" Coppelia snapped back to the present and ran over with Chrono to assist their new friend.

Paem needed no help, however. She seemed to be more than a match for Yu the Fisherman to the point where she had wrested his hook out of his hands and thrown it into the water.

Yu spoke for the first time, permitting his raspy voice to indulge in but a single word: "Retreat."

When Plum Blossom didn't answer, Yu summoned a bit of his magic power to form a Gate under Plum Blossom, warping her to safety back on the ship, while Yu floated back to join her.

Coppelia tugged on Chrono's shirt. "Mister Chrono, did you hear what Plum Blossom said?"

"Orchid is out west," said Chrono. "I heard, so I guess that is where we should go next. After we get rid of this guy, anyway."

Crow cackled from his perch back on the deck of the ship. "You have been quite entertaining, but I think you'll find me even more of a challenge than those other two. I doubt you can even hurt me. You can't fight Death."

"We shall see," said Coppelia. "Both Mister Chrono and I have something to fight for."

"Hey," said Paem, "so do I! I have my town and my friends and my factory, not to mention my key. I have everything on the line."

"I did not intend to leave you out, Miss Paem," said Coppelia.

"I'm sure you have all the reasons in the world to fight," said Crow, "but those never mean anything in the end. I always win, whether a town is at stake or an entire kingdom. I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds. This place is naturally mine! If you won't hand over the key to the Golem factory, I'll have to take it."

"You just sound like a windbag to me," said Chrono. "If you're so strong, why do you wait back there?"

Crow pulled a long sword from under his cloak and pointed it at Chrono. "You will be the first to die." Then he charged.

First, he attacked Paem. As she readied herself for a blow from his sword, he whipped his other arm around fired off an attack spell that caught her off guard. Paem's knees buckled, and she collapsed on the ground. Crow then came for Coppelia, charging with his sword in front of him. When he reached her, she attempted to dodge his magic attack, but he corrected for her dodge and fired off to the side, connecting squarely and knocking her onto her back. As if he knew that she had a very short recovery time, he raised his hand in to the air and willed a magical explosion in the ground under Coppelia. A hail of rocks shot into the air and fell back onto her crumpled body, pinning her down.

Crow then turned to Chrono. Once again, he charged with his sword in front of him, but this time he actually tried striking with his sword. Chrono correctly guessed his move and parried the blow, and he also dodged back before Crow could kick him while their swords were locked. Crow charged again, and once again Chrono parried him. Crow changed his strategy for his third charge and attempted a magical strike, but Chrono counterattacked and raked his sword across Crow's midsection. Crow cried in agony but began yet another charge. He struck with his sword again, and once again Chrono parried him.

"You are good," said Crow. "You remind me of someone I faced in Kalinovo, only faster. I'll enjoy killing you even more than I enjoyed killing him."

"I won't… oooph!" Chrono, distracted by Crow's speech and his own efforts to remember the place named Kalinovo, took a blow to the chin and fell backwards. Crow kicked Chrono's sword away, stood over him, and laughed.

"Defenseless?" Crow mocked, lilting his head to one side.

"No." Chrono closed his eyes, lifted his hands over his hand, and shouted the name of a spell he had not cast in years.

"Luminaire!"

The air ripped apart with a resounding zap. A blast of light devoured both Chrono and Crow, and then all sounds and sights stopped.


	16. Queen's Pawn Opening

Chapter 15 – Queen's Pawn Opening

Samsara hardly glanced up from her computer's monitor when a knock came to her bedroom door. She ignored it the second time, and the third, but it persisted.

"I'm busy," she said loudly enough for Jinling to hear outside.

"You've been in there all day," came Jinling's reply. "Seriously, you're going to fall behind on your other work, and I'm going to starve. It's your turn to buy groceries, remember?"

Samsara growled at the door and returned her attention to her computer, but Jinling's knocking and her voice grew louder.

"If you don't come out here and at least go _with_ me to the grocery store, I'm going to have to break down your door and feed your computer to Dr. Turing's pet Doberman. You hear me, Sam? I'm serious this time."

A pang of hunger in Samsara's stomach finally pushed her over the edge. She folded up a few sheets of paper on top of her desk, locked her computer system, and slipped her notepad into her pocket. The notepad stuck out over the top, so she pulled on her favorite red coat and hat before opening her door.

Unfortunately, she picked the second Jinling was about to knock again to open the door, and Jinling, hardly paying attention by this point, banged her knuckle against Samsara's skull instead of the hardy wood of the door.

"Ouch!" Samsara cried. "Watch where you're…."

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Jinling, suddenly concerned about someone else's welfare. "I thought you were still at your computer."

"Never mind," said Samsara. "Just let me know what to pick up. Geez, they're paying you enough now that I'd think you'd just hire someone to go shopping for you."

Jinling grinned, too broadly. "What're friends for?"

"The one doing the favor is supposed to be the one who says that!" Samsara stomped down the hallway toward the front door and left without saying goodbye.

XXX

"How long has she been at it today?" Jinling wondered to herself. "This isn't like her. Not when she's had sleep and coffee, anyway. Hmm. Just what was she working on?"

Jinling thought for a moment about the rules of etiquette toward roommates, about her friendship with Samsara and all the challenges they had met together and overcome, about her own moral and ethical standards, and about how hard she judged Samsara could punch her if she got caught, and she decided to take a risk. After watching the front door shut and hearing the lock click into place, she turned the knob to Samsara's room and pushed the door open.

The inside was mostly dark, but Samsara's monitor had not yet switched into powersave mode, so its flickering blue light partially illuminated the desk and floor sections of the room. Samsara had left in a rush, so the desk chair was not pushed properly back into place, and an incriminating energy bar wrapper lay on the floor next to, as opposed to inside, the waste bin. Samsara's open closet doors stared Jinling in the face as if warning her that she was in forbidden territory.

A lump formed in Jinling's throat. She fumbled about with her hand in search of the light switch, and when she found it, she flipped it on as quickly as she could.

_Fzzzt, pop!_ she heard. The overhead flashed on for a split second before fizzling out and leaving the room just as dark as before.

"Wrong bulbs again," Jinling whispered to herself. "That girl can do just about anything she wants, but she couldn't find the right lightbulbs to save her own life. Five minutes of thought could save her how many trips to the store?"

Jinling stepped over to Samsara's computer, nearly tripping on a pile of unfolded clothes lying in the middle of the floor. Atop the desk lay a few notebooks, about half of which Jinling recognized as some of Samsara's work on temporal mathematics. These had the official seal of Balthasar University on their covers. Most of the rest looked somewhat less formal. A few even had doodles on their covers.

Jinling snickered. So Samsara's playful side did come out at work, at least when no one else was watching.

Most of the doodles were of a robot. They were probably all representations of the same robot, at least on a crude level. It was vaguely humanoid, though it resembled a round human or a bowling ball more than a normal, healthy human. Its eyes were large and round, and the rest of its head was short and flat. Its legs were run of the mill for a science fiction robot, but its arms ended in what looked more like claws than hands.

"Is this her work on artificial intelligence? Did she… build this?"

Jinling shook her head. "This isn't hers. This is her mother's robot. R66-Y, was it? Maybe the computer will tell me something."

Jinling look up at the monitor and groaned. "It's locked, and I don't think I know her password. Time to guess, maybe?"

Jinling typed. P-R-O-M-E-T-H-E-U-S.

The computer beeped an indignant reply and spat the lock screen back up at her.

"Well, that's not it. Hmm. What else is there? She's got to have it lying around, I would think. I doubt she would trust herself to remember something she couldn't look up."

The last thing Jinling wanted to do was dig through half a dozen notebooks for a password, so she looked back at the computer. She noticed something.

"That's funny. Sam isn't the type to leave the volume turned off. I thought she listened to some sort of music while doing her work. Maybe if…."

She turned the appropriate knob on the monitor and felt a wave of sound pour out from the desk speakers and wash over her. The music was soothing and upbeat at the same time, mostly with a full orchestra but with a few playful moments of mostly strings and some sort of chime. It was as if the orchestra were imitating a music box.

"Could it…?"

Jinling tried another password. D-E-L-I-B-E-S.

The computer let out a happy chime, and the lock page vanished.

"Way to go, Jinling," she congratulated herself. "For future reference, Sam keeps an audible record of her password. Now, what's this, A.I. stuff? No."

Samsara had left several programs running. Of course she had her mathematical software, but she also had a window for her programming environment and her email.

"Sam would kill me if she saw this. Oh man, this is bad." Jinling actually shivered, but she regained her composure and brought herself to read down a list of emails. Half of them were from her, and a good portion of the rest were from faculty of Balthasar University, but a few of the remaining messages came from someone Samsara had never mentioned.

"Nimzovich at cs dot balthasar dot edu. Interesting. Why don't I know him? Does Sam actually…? No, it couldn't be. Does she have a boyfriend?"

Jinling laughed out loud.

"Naw, she would have told me something like that. This has to be something even more mysterious. Still, what could be more mysterious than Samsara Ashtear's romantic history? Does she even have one of those?"

Jinling giggled again, this time for nearly half a minute, before continuing with her speculation.

"It looks like someone from the computer science department. Is he helping her with her A.I. project? Is he a friend or colleague? How long have those two been talking?"

The emails from Nimzovich had blank subject lines, so Jinling contemplated whether or not she should read them. She couldn't quite justify clicking on one at random, so she told the computer to sort them according to sender and then according to subject, in order to see if Nimzovich sent anything without a blank subject. It turned out he sent only one.

"Lucca," it read.

"Her mother. This person must be interested in her mother's research. What kind of research, though? Physics? Mathematics? Robotics? A.I.? Oh, Jinling, stop tempting yourself. It's got to be the computer stuff if he's in the CS department."

But her hand did not listen to her conscience. Instead it guided the mouse, moving the cursor over to Nimzovich's email, and clicked twice.

A new window popped up onscreen. Inside, at the top, was a picture of Lucca Ashtear. Below that was a lengthy message, which Jinling could not bring herself to read. If it were anyone but Sam, it wouldn't be a problem, but she felt guilty enough even invading the room without going through private emails about Sam's family.

Unless it was about Lucca's work, of course, in which case it would all just be innocent curiosity. Intellectual curiosity. Sam would be happy to see that, wouldn't she?  
A few sentences into the email, it became apparent that Nimzovich was a big fan of Samsara's mother. He seemed to know all about her work, and he wanted to make sure Samsara knew that as early as he could. Consequently, the first couple of paragraphs consisted mostly of computer science jargon that Jinling wouldn't have been able to decipher if her life depended on it.

"I don't understand the appeal of this no matter how many times she explains it in depth. I just don't." Jinling squinted at the screen and scrolled down in search of more interesting text.

She found none, however. The rest of the email contained a few equations and some computer code, and the very last line read, "Your move."

"Funny way to end things," Jinling thought. "I'd have been a bit more polite. I think. Maybe not to Sam."

She closed the window and clicked on the next email from the same sender. Like the rest, it had no subject line, and curiously enough, the only text inside consisted of a couple of numbers and letters: "1. d4 Nf6"

Jinling puzzled over her discovery for a few seconds, but then a clicking sound from the front door startled her. In a rush, she closed the email window, threw some of the notebooks back into a pile on the desk, turned down the computer's volume, and locked the screen again. Before Samsara could make it inside, she darted out, shut the door, rushed into the kitchen, and pretended to care very much about making herself a sandwich.

When she remembered that the food was all gone, she left the mayonnaise jar out and ran to her room. She heard Samsara call a greeting out to her, but before she went to reply, she dug a scrap of paper out from her own desk and scribbled the contents of Nimzovich's second email down for later contemplation.

XXX

Beyond Time

When the light finally faded, only Crow was left standing. Paem was in the best shape of the rest; she managed to struggle to her knees. Chrono lay on his back, gasping and panting. Coppelia didn't move at all. But Crow, despite being the only one on his feet, looked worse than everyone else. The blast sapped most of his strength, to the point where he feared further attacks even from a weakened and weary Chrono. As quickly as his injured body would allow, he stalked over to the boarding plank leading back to his ship.

Unfortunately for him, he did not make it all the way before Coppelia recovered enough strength to lob a rock at his head. She scored a direct hit, dazing him further. Now hobbling around like a drunken sailor, Crow took one too many steps to the left and missed the plank entirely. With a curse, he tumbled over the edge and splashed into the water below.

No one said a word until Coppelia finally stood up and then helped Chrono and Paem to their feet. When everyone could confirm no major injuries, they began to discuss the situation.

Paem was the first to point out, "That man was a blowhard!"

"And you've never seen him before," Chrono added.

"That's right. The others are regular nuisances, but he's new. He scares me, too. All that power."

"Miss Paem," said Coppelia, "if those others cause trouble on a regular basis, do you mind informing us what their motives are?"

Paem shook her head. "I don't know for sure. Conquest, maybe. They always travel through Gates, so I don't know just where they come from. Maybe it's a rotten place and they want to settle in greener pastures, so to speak."

"It must be _really_ rotten to look green compares to here," said Chrono.

Paem sighed. "Please remember that this is my home."

"Sorry," said Chrono. "It just seems a little dreary to me."

"Dreary to one is cozy to another," said Paem. "I prefer to stay away from the light if I can, so the colors here suit me. And this place isn't so bad if you get used to it. Not that I mind traveling once in a while."

Chrono nodded. "I know how that is. Wanderlust, I think it's called."

Coppelia changed the subject. "Miss Paem, we previously read what we believe to be a foundation myth for these lands, and in that myth were characters named Plum Blossom and Yu the Fisherman. Do you have any idea if there is any connection between the characters in the story and the assassins we just fought?"

"The original Plum Blossom and Yu are either fictional or long gone," said Paem. "Whoever these guys are, they probably read our myth and then assumed the names in order to intimidate us."

"That or they were written into the myth as villains," Chrono suggested. "Just how old is the story, anyway?"  
"The story is much older than our enemies," said Paem. "I can guarantee that. And the characters in the story are not evil. Do you remember? They were good friends of the King of the Dead until they vanished."

"This may sound like a stupid question," said Chrono, "but is the King of the Dead at all related to the Princess of the Dead? The Fairy Disenchantment said something about her, so I wouldn't mind knowing more."

"The Princess of the Dead, called Giselle, is as her title suggests a part of the royal family, although families here do not work the same way as families of living people. She is most likely an adopted daughter."

"And Miss Orchid?" asked Coppelia. "Plum Blossom seemed to know of her. Are you certain you do not know more about her?"

Paem hung her head. "I don't. I don't know anyone called Orchid. These mysterious invaders have been coming by for many ages now, so I am quite familiar with most of them, but I do not recall any named Orchid. Four of them are named after the Four Flowers from the myth, but those are Plum Blossom, Cherry Blossom, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo. Actually, with Crow the newcomer to their group, I wonder if they haven't expanded recently. Your Orchid could be another new member. That would explain why she is supposedly about to lead a raid on the western province. If not, then I don't really know what's going on. Two attacks on different areas in such a short period of time indicate that something big could be brewing. If some new leader took over for them, maybe we will have to rethink our defensive plans."

"Be that as it may," said Coppelia, "I intend to go west to find out about Miss Orchid. That is my mission."

"If you don't mind," said Paem, "would you like to come with me to speak with Kuei first? I think we should all carefully consider our next move. I would also like to check on my friends Sajo and Mal. I'm sure they're okay, but they may be able to tell us more about what Crow is up to. Chrono, do you agree with my plan?"

"I do," said Chrono, "but only if the meeting is brief. I want to go along with Coppelia, but I think we will both be better off if we learn as much as we can before we go. Since you seem to be quite good with information, we'll stick with you a little longer."

"Excellent," said Paem. "Then follow me. We're going back to town."


	17. Council

Chapter 16 – Council

Kuei's mansion stood in stark relief against the rest of the buildings on the east edge of town. While its size was not by any means imposing, it bore signs of actual aesthetic flourishes on its outside. Where other structures in the area had only bare black stone, it boasted relief carvings of a man in scaled armor standing over an image of the city, gazing off into the distance as if looking to spot danger. Much of the rock face on the sides of other buildings was rough and unpolished; not so Kuei's walls, which looked almost glossy. His was also the only building in town to have in front of it any trace of flora, in the form of several small rose bushes.

Inside, the dominant color remained black, but splotches of red interrupted it on curtains covering the windows and velvet cushions atop pedestals holding up small statues and other stonework. The whole first chamber had the air of either a museum or, thanks to the color scheme, a mausoleum. What seemed strange to Chrono was that whoever designed the place must have chosen the gloomy look out of preference, not mere for lack of resources—even the paintings on the walls comprised no more than three colors apiece, without exception black, white, and red.

Paem led the way to a set of black, stone double doors at the back of the room. She knocked on the middle of the right door three times with her staff, and then she waited until it groaned its way open. Flickering candlelight crept through as the doors swung inward, apparently the only light in the windowless next room. Paem marched in without waiting for an invitation, and Chrono and Coppelia followed.

The candlelit chamber turned out to be an anteroom, more like a hallway than a real room. The only objects inside were a few candles in wall sconces and another pair of stone doors at the back. No paintings hung on the walls. As soon as Chrono and Coppelia stepped past the radius of the doors' arcing path, the doors shut themselves behind everyone. Then the lights went out.

"What is this?" Chrono called out.

"Stay still," Paem answered. "This is just a security measure. I can get us into the next room."

"I can't move?"

"Not yet." Paem said nothing more, but Chrono could still make out a few scuffing and tapping sounds before a bright white vertical line appeared at the back end of the room. The line grew thicker until it became apparent that it was a crack in the doorway.

"Follow me now," Paem ordered.

After two dark rooms, the lack of darkness in the next room surprised Chrono, as did the lack of size. The whole room was shaped like a circle only a few yards in diameter. The walls, floor, and ceiling were as black as anything else in the building, but a columns of white light rose out of the middle of the room and stretched up to the top. Chrono squinted to avoid being blinded. "In here," said Paem. She walked into the center of the pillar and vanished. Having seen this sort of setup before, Chrono hardly hesitated before following her. His body turned weightless as the world dissolved away around him, only to reform in the next room, which looked exactly like the previous. He stepped out of the column and stood by Paem's side as he waited for Coppelia to materialize.

"We're here," said Paem, pointing to the chamber's exit. "Be polite. Those unfamiliar with this land might underestimate the importance of the man who takes up residence behind these doors."

Chrono nodded.

Paem tapped the right door three times again, and it slid to the side, revealing a room quite different from those before it.

Black and white checkered marble replaced the rough stone floors of every other room in town, and a ring of lamps around the perimeter bathed everything in a softer, more comfortable light than the candles had. Four of the lamps stood out from the rest; at the back of the room, there stood a purple lamp, a yellow lamp, a red lamp, and a blue lamp, watching over all of the others.

A conference table stretched across the middle of the room, surrounded by at least two dozen chairs. Three of the chairs at the far end were occupied, though all three people occupying them stood up when they saw Paem.

The first occupant was a tall, bald man with a rough face darkened by a tattoo in the shape of a horse. He wore nothing but a silver kilt around his waist. A large sledgehammer sat on the table in front of him. The second, sitting across from him, was a woman who looked slightly older than Chrono. Her face poked out from behind a hefty helping of fiery red hair, which ran down the length of her back and stood out against her shiny white robe and red belt. She wore sandals on her feet.

The third was a man nearly as wide as he was tall, dressed in full armor like the statue in the town square and the carvings on the outside of the building. His helmet and suit were both dark green and very, very round. Dark eyes peered out from under a scaly visor atop his forehead.

Seeing these three, Paem dropped any pretense of formality and sprinted over to the woman. She threw her arms around her neck and just barely choked out a greeting through a wave of tears.

"Sajo, Mal," she said. "You're alive!"

"Of course we are alive," the woman replied in an even voice. "Why would you think otherwise?"

"We were told something might have happened to you. I thought maybe you guys were hurt or…"

The man across the table snorted. His voice boomed out across the room: "It was a pitiful excuse for an ambush. Nothing we could not handle."

"We need to talk more about this, though," the woman added. "But first, you need to report. Who are these visitors?"

Paem took a few seconds to collect herself. Remarkably, when she regained full composure, she left no sign that she had just broken down.

"These two are friends who helped fight off Crow."

The man in scale armor spoke for the first time: "We will have formal introductions when everyone is seated. If they are your friends, then they may join us at our table. Be warned that I may dismiss them at any time."

"Yes, Kuei," Paem said. She turned to Chrono and Coppelia. "Please, have a seat. I think we all have plenty to talk about."

Chrono sat down next to the large man with the hammer, and Coppelia took a seat next to him. Paem herself sat down next to the red-haired woman. Kuei took the seat at the very head of the table.

Paem spoke first. "My lord Kuei, the young man here is named Chrono, and the young woman is named Coppelia. I met the two when they came across my shop. I found them interesting. They seemed to recognize the Dreamstone despite being obvious outworlders with no knowledge of anything around here. After a philosophical discussion, I took them to Himmelkreuz, and that's when the alarm sounded."

"You took two people you had just met to Himmelkreuz?" asked the woman. "I hope you had a good reason."

Paem nodded. "Were they spies, they would have pretended not to know what Dreamstone is. The young woman brought with her curious ideas about the art of prediction, so I decided to give the two of them a quick tour. It's not like they would be any danger to me, anyway. Chrono, Coppelia, by the way, this cynical woman here is named Sajo, and the next to you is Mal. They are my two best friends, and together we serve under Lord Kuei."

"Those are the two Crow mentioned during our fight," said Chrono. "Just before he said something about Golems."

"Correct," said Paem. "And I know I promised to tell you more about the Golems. Essentially, they are how we obtain the Dreamstone. We build them in a factory out behind the lake and near the mines, and then we ship them over to do the mining for us. It's a task much too dangerous for a person, living or dead. The Golems are just machines, so we take advantage of that."

Coppelia blinked. "If you continually manufacture more, then I assume many are destroyed in the mine. Is this correct?"

"More or less," said Paem. "Accidents are fairly rare, but the Golems do wear out after a while, so we have to keep making them. Sometimes we ship them off to other places, as well."

"And you have the key to this factory?" Chrono asked. "That's what Crow implied."

"I do," said Paem. "It's the same key I used to get us in here."

Kuei looked at Paem. "This Crow you mention, he wanted your key?"

Paem coughed. "He said so."

"I do not remember anyone named Crow," said Mal.

"I think he's new," said Paem. "In any case, I hadn't seen him before. I don't really know what he wants with the Golems, but he scares me more than a little. He might have killed us all if it weren't for Chrono."

Sajo raised an eyebrow. "Really? He's strong enough to beat even you?"

"Believe it or not," said Paem. "He was tougher even than Plum Blossom or Yu the Fisherman."

Kuei grunted and folded his hands under his chin. "These are troubling tidings you bring, Paem. The balance of this world has been upset. I may have to assume a more active role until this is resolved. Is there anything else to report?"

"I have a question," said Coppelia.

"Speak," Kuei replied.

"Do you know Miss Orchid? My purpose for being here is to locate her, and I have only one lead so far. Crow said she would soon lead an invasion of the province to the west, so Mister Chrono and I plan to travel that way to find her."

"An invasion in Qilin's land?" Kuei pondered this news. "What could be going on?"

"That's three attacks in three areas in a very small span of time," said Paem. "Three attacks, and no obvious reason behind any of them except for the one intended to distract Mal and Sajo. I never heard what happened there, either."

"Not much," said Sajo. "It was a little unexpected, fighting all those Golems, but in the end they were nothing more than a hassle. No real danger."

"Golems?" said Paem. "Weren't they supposed to be after Golems?"

"Different Golems," said Mal. "Smaller. Weaker. We crushed them."

Sajo counted off on her fingers. "Golems, imps, Crab-Flowers, assorted other monsters… We fought a horde of the things. It was tiring. In the end, we killed them all before any could get inside the factory, but I don't remember ever facing an invasion like that before. It was strange."

"Crow said he thought you would be killed," said Paem. "Yet you didn't seem to have any trouble. If he underestimated you that badly, maybe it's because he doesn't quite know what he's doing yet. This supports my hypothesis that he's a new arrival."

"Young Coppelia," Kuei said, returning to an earlier subject, "I must confess that I do not know anyone named Orchid. However, our goals may overlap. I am charged with protecting this world, and to do so I may need more information. I must learn the objective of our enemies, and if your Orchid is among them, I would like to know more about her. You previously announced your intention to search Qilin's desert for the invading Orchid, did you not? I now order Paem to accompany you and report any findings back to me. Her specialty is information, and it might be a good move to keep her away from the Golem factory for a while."

"My lord Kuei," said Paem, "if I am away, will there be sufficient defenses back home? I know I am instrumental to protecting our home from attack, and I expect more to come. I doubt our enemies will give up so easily, whatever their reasons for their assault."

Kuei stood up. His frame dwafted everyone else at the table, including Mal, who was himself a very large man. Kuei nearly blocked out the light from the four large lamps behind him. "I will take your place until you return. There will be no need to worry. I can operate Himmelkreuz, and I know I am more than a match for Plum Blossom or Yu."

"My lord," said Paem, "I will do as you say."

"Let us recap all that we know, then," said Kuei. "Paem, you were the closest to the recent attack, so please remind us all."

"Certainly," said Paem. "We know of at least three attacks. Two have happened, and one is still just a threat. One attack was to obtain the Golems, and one was the distract Mal and Sajo. The third attack, whose purpose is unknown, is to be led by someone named Orchid. A new foe named Crow headed the attack I and my friends intercepted. And I think that is all that we know for now. My task is to gather new information, and to do that, I will set off with Chrono and Coppelia while you stay behind in case Crow returns."

"That is it, I think," said Chrono. "In addition, I wish to aid Coppelia in finding her friend, and I myself wish to find a way home. We are both here, but neither of us is dead, or so I hope. Eventually, I want to return to the land of the living."

"I have already explained my mission," said Coppelia, "but it bears repeating that my primary objective is to locate Miss Orchid. Anything else is a lower priority for me."

"Very well, then," said Kuei. "The three of you about to depart are dismissed. I wish to continue council with Mal and Sajo for a bit longer. Best of luck to you, and I hope we can reach the root of this problem before it becomes unmanageable."

"We shall do our best," said Paem.


	18. The Crab Flower Club

Chapter 17 – The Crab Flower Club

The path to the western desert, to Qilin's domain, ran alongside the river for a ways, giving Chrono and Coppelia another good look at the gloomy paradise they were leaving. The Himmelkreuz tower seemed to stare at them the whole length of the way, an ancient monolith taking in one more miniscule, hardly notable sight in its long life of sitting and watching. Beyond the far shore of the lake, a few distant red lights flickered from what Paem explained was the Golem factory and the Dreamstone mines.

For a while, the scenery remained constant, but then the path ran up against a familiar stone wall. The wall itself looked darker than before, contrasting starkly with the bright gold metal door set in an arch made out of lighter, concrete gray blocks. Inscribed in the keystone atop the arch were symbols foreign to Chrono and Coppelia; Paem could read them.

"This is the way," she told her companions. "You can see Qilin's name above the door, even if you do not recognize the script."

Paem approached the door, looking smaller and smaller the nearer she came to it. It rose three times her height when she stood next to it, and her attempt to pull on the oversized handle just above her head would have been comical had the door not swung open with relatively little effort.

Chrono had to shield his eyes at what came out of the open doorframe: light. Bright, yellow light, white light, and a sprinkling of a rich orange light, jetting out and laying bare the blacks and purples of the surroundings with the ferocity of a stream of water being squeezed out of a balloon with a hole in it. Even with his eyes closed, Chrono saw bright spots of light dancing in front of his face, exploding and reforming and then exploding again.

He then felt someone pushing on his back.

"Hurry," Paem's voice told him. "Let's get through and then close the gate."

Hands firmly clamped over the top half of his face, Chrono trudged forward, letting Paem guide him to the other side. As he stepped under the arch, Chrono felt and heard a gust of cool wind brush up against his face. One step further, the cool wind turned hot, and the gusting sound turned into a howl. Paem let go, and a second later, the door crashed shut behind them. Chrono's head throbbed.

"You can open your eyes now," Paem said. "It's not so bad here."

Slowly, tentatively, Chrono pulled his hands away from his face. He allowed his eyes a sliver of a view underneath his eyelids to make sure the going was safe, and then he dragged them the rest of the way. The new surroundings were still light enough to disorient him until his eyes finished adjusting, but they were not nearly as bad as they appeared from the other side of the door.

Chrono's initial assessment of the new land resulted in a bit of disappointment; there was no vegetation anywhere in sight. All around, as far as he could see in any direction, there was nothing but sand. Even behind him, behind the door and its arch, he could see more and more sand, with no sign of the shiny black stone ground to which he had grown somewhat accustomed except on the door, which on this side appeared to be made out of the same material as everything in Kuei's land.

The sky overhead seemed to hang low with dirty orange clouds floating amidst a background of pale yellow. The sand around clumped into dunes in places and spread out like a lake in others, interrupted occasionally by yellow and orange rocks. An innocuous looking lizard would occasionally poke its head out from under one of the rocks, flick its tongue a couple of times, and then crawl away. Throughout, a dusty wind stung Chrono's face, sometimes whipping into gusts saturated by particles of sand and dust and dirt and forcing Chrono to hide his face again.

"Do not worry," Paem shouted over the wind. "The sand stops fairly soon, and we can walk undisturbed on solid rock."

"How far is that?" said Chrono.

"I… don't know," said Paem. "It has been ages since I have been here, and I don't like coming all that much, to be honest. It's too bright here."

"It looks pretty dingy to me," said Chrono.

"Did it when you first opened your eyes? It's entirely relative."

Coppelia interjected, "It is not entirely relative. One can perceive contrasting levels of brightness, but one can easily judge whether a light is bright or a room is dark without comparison to another room."

Paem sighed. "I don't think I've ever met someone who talked so much on so many different matters."

"I have," Chrono said under his breath.

XXX

Several long hours of marching through the hot desert air and enduring sandstorm after sandstorm did little to boost Chrono's confidence in Paem's assessment of the situation. The wind stubbornly refused to die down, and the soft ground did not give way to solid rock. Pebbles and grains and other assorted units of sand continued to batter any skin Chrono left exposed, forcing him to pull his collar up over his mouth. This protected him somewhat from the sandstorms, though it made the thick desert odors more prominent, his collar smeared with sweat and a thick layer of dust.

At last he decided to keep an eye out for any rock formations that might offer some temporary shelter so he could stop and rest and recover. He figured the pain of having to look ahead and scan the area every hundred yards or so would be offset by the chance to sit down. When he finally spotted someplace suitable, he made a mad dash for it.

The formation Chrono chose was a raised slab of rock with a smaller slab on top of it. The leeward side of the top slab had in it an inviting opening leading into a small, windless cave with surprisingly sweet air inside, as well as…

"Flowers?" Chrono sniffed the air, smiled, and let some of the tension out of his arms and legs, slumping onto the floor with a glazed look on his face.

Indeed, scattered around the room were some of the largest flowers he had ever seen, each blossom a colorful disc two feet or more in diameter, sitting atop a messy mound of leaves and stems and what looked like soil.

"This is strange," said Coppelia. "I have never before encountered a species of flower that could survive indoors while growing out of a rock. I must make a note of this. I would worry if I had not already observed plants in this realm that defied all commonsense rules of botany and ecology."

"The forest?" Chrono laughed.

"Indeed, Mister Chrono. Afterlife flora continue to astonish me."

"I'll worry more when I'm less tired," Chrono said. "For now, I just want to enjoy this little slice of heaven without necessarily making sense of it. You have to admit that it's easier to breathe in here than it is out there."

Paem nodded. "I think so, too. We'll need to stop for a rest eventually, so why not here?"

Without waiting for Coppelia to add her assent, Paem huddled against the wall near the door and almost immediately nodded off.

"You tired, Coppelia?" Chrono asked.

"I am not," she replied. "If you are, then please take this opportunity to relax and regain your strength. I shall stand watch."

Chrono wanted to argue that Coppelia was pushing herself too hard and that she should get some sleep as well, but before he could, he found his vision fading and his thoughts giving way to dreams full of the smell of peppermints.

XXX

He woke with a start when he felt someone shoving him. It was Coppelia.

"Mister Chrono," she said, "you must not sleep now. Please get up and see what is going on."

Chrono rolled himself over and then pulled himself up to his knees and then to his feet. He looked up at Coppelia and found himself met by an expression of calm worry, if there could be said to be such a thing.

"What?"

Coppelia pointed at the flowers. For a minute, Chrono could not sense anything amiss, but then it struck him that all of them—all twelve, he counted—had bent the faces of their blossoms in his direction. They also appeared to be much nearer to him than they had been when he first went to sleep.

"You are finally awake, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. "I could not wake Miss Paem, and only after fifteen minutes of shaking you could I get any reaction. I believe the plants in here emit a sedative gas. You must overcome it and stand up."  
Chrono rubbed his eyes; they stung at the touch of his sandy wrists. He then scraped the palms of his hands against each other vigorously in an attempt to remove at least some of the sand, and when he figured he had, he went at his eyes again. They stung again, but not as much.

A thought occurred to Chrono. "Are these flowers…?"

"It would appear so," Coppelia answered before he could finish. "I believe the riddle of their source of nutrition is solved. They lure their prey into their den with their aroma, and then they poison it before ingesting it slowly."

Chrono leveraged himself against his sword and stood up. "I won't be food for a plant!"

"Not for them," said a new voice from somewhere in the middle of the cave.

The voice surprised Chrono enough to shock him into full consciousness. He turned his head to face the sound.

"Not for them at all," it continued. "It's for us."

Recognition struck Chrono. "You again! Where is Disenchantment?"

The form of a demon melted into view, its tiny, beady eyes fixed on Chrono.

"She's nowhere where she can help you," said the demon. "You are to fall to Pain and Passion."

Chrono smirked and drew his sword. "Is that so? You've lost the element of surprise this time, and I am no longer unarmed."

"We have you outnumbered."

"I see one demon and a bunch of plants."

The demon howled and shook with what Chrono guessed was supposed to be laughter. "Pain and Passion and more," it said, "all against a foolish human. You will be a much easier target than the fairy was. Much easier, indeed! What a delightful turn of events for us."

Chrono dashed forward, leaped in the air, and slashed at the demon, but it floated back to the far end of the cave and laughed again.

"We do not wish our hands to become dirty," it said. "No we don't. Why don't you play with our friends? Yes, our friends."

When he landed, Chrono suddenly felt vulnerable, so he raised his sword and took a defensive stance. Nothing happened for a second or two, but then suddenly, all at once, all twelve flowers swiveled around to face him.

"What?"

"Aw, the foolish human is confused," said the demon. "Does it not want to play our game? Does it not want to stay for dinner?"

Chrono noticed one of the flowers turning away from him. He shouted, "Coppelia, protect Paem! She's still out, isn't she?"

Then the flowers charged. Eleven of them went straight at Chrono, moving as quickly as an adult human might run. With little time to sort out his options, Chrono quickly vaulted over one of the flowers and landed behind it, bring his sword down on its back as he fell. The sword sliced through the petals and the stem and down into the soil with a slow squishing sound. When he pulled the blade out, he found it stained dark purple.

"That's no plant," he muttered, and the demon laughed again, a horrible, shrill laugh than began as a cackle and then built up into a roar.

"Our friends are not plants, it says. Hee hee. Is it blind? We think it is. Whoa!"

The demon ducked as a flower, roots and all, flew from about where Coppelia was standing and nearly struck it in the head. The flower crashed into the wall and crumpled to the floor, unmoving.

"The human's friend, it has fangs, it does," said the demon. "But we are far too powerful. We will kill the human and steal his rock, we will."

"You haven't done a thing," said Chrono.

"Our friends," it countered. "Our friends are more than a match for you, when you see them for what they are. Come, friends! Trueform change!"

The ten remaining flowers stopped moving. For a second, they trembled like chattering teeth on a cold day, and then in a flash they vanished, replaced by large, round, bug-like monsters. Conspicuously, the sweet flowery smell vanished. About five of the monsters reared their heads up, bared their fangs, and shot some spines off of their limbs at Chrono.

"Yakra?" Chrono said, confused. He ducked out of the way of the shower of spines and readied himself for another volley.

"It calls them Yakra," the demon said, "when we know they are called Crab Flowers. Neither crab nor flower, but both at the same time, and all deadly. We love our pets dearly, we do."

Another volley of spines from five of the Crab Flowers whistled its way toward Chrono just as the other five readied another charge. Unable to jump over the charging line this time, Chrono ducked out of the way to the side and managed to catch one of the charging monsters with his sword.

With an icky splatting sound, Coppelia squished two more of the Crab Flowers against each other. Chrono fell back toward where Paem lay on the ground but though better of it when he remembered the spine attacks; instead, he charged the pack of Crab Flowers and cut two more in half.

"It makes sport of our pets," said the demon. "The foolish human and its filthy friend want sport, do they? No sport! We must spoil their fun. Go for the sleeping one, my pets! Kill it!"

Chrono gasped and turned his attention to Paem. Without thinking, he ran over to where she lay and shook her shoulders as hard as he could. Almost instantly, her eyes popped open. When she saw the monsters behind Chrono's back, she scrambled for her staff and clawed her way to her feet.

The demon cursed. "Why does it not sleep? We think it… aaagh, we need the flowers to make the filthy creature sleep, we do. Sneaky human, ruining our bed of flowers."

Chrono and Paem scattered in opposite directions to avoid yet another volley of spines. Without wasting a second, Chrono took the offensive and charged for the group of Crab Flowers, sword flailing. He managed to kill three more.

"You control your passion well," said the demon, "but you are your pain. Now you are your pain, and you will be more when we are through. Come, my pets!"

It raised a clawed hand in the air and uttered a short chant, and suddenly the remaining Crab Flowers glowed bright white. Each then split into two, with both resulting monsters more or less the same size as the original had been.

The demon cackled again. "More and more, the number she grows! Where she stops, only we knows!"

A shadow appeared on the wall behind Paem. At first, it looked like a shapeless blob, but it hardened into a serpent and dove toward the pack of Crab Flowers, swallowing one. For some reason, this amused the demon.

"A snake in the flowers from the snake in the grass," it said. "But we will make them faster than you can eat them, we will."

Before it even finished speaking, the Crab Flowers split again.

"Mister Chrono," said Coppelia from across the room, "I suggest we reevaluate our strategy."

"Let's," said Chrono, turning his attention to the demon and dashing straight for it. A wall of Crab Flowers sprang up in his way, but Copplia punched one on the left end hard enough to send it careening into the second and third, knocking all three out of commission. A fourth found itself a victim of one of Paem's shadow spells.

But before Chrono could close the gap between himself and the demon, another figure stood up behind it and swung a giant broadsword over its head and into the demon's back. The demon let out a shriek of pain and flew off in two different directions.

"It split, as well?" Paem looked back and forth between two demons identical to the original, each trying hard to catch its breath.

"We will make you regret this," said one of them. "Pain will overcome you."

"As will passion," said the other. "You will see. You will succumb."

The demons clapped their hands in unison and then vanished, along with the Crab Flowers, in a puff of foul smelling smoke, leaving a sulfurous odor in their wake. Chrono dropped his sword and covered his nose.

The newcomer stepped forward and bowed. When he entered the shaft of light streaming in from the cave entrance, Chrono could se that he was a tall man wearing a suit of light silver armor, red boots, a red cape, and red gloves, and a large, black helmet covering his entire head. The helmet appeared completely solid, with no removable visor. Large, twisting horns protruded from either side of the top, curling downward like canine teeth.

"You have my gratitude for freeing me from the spell of those creatures," he said. "To my shame, I did not notice in time what they were, nor was I able to stand up to their venom."  
"You were here this whole time?" said Chrono.

"On the floor in the corner, out of sight, asleep," said the man.

"Did you wake when the flowers transformed into monsters?" Coppelia wondered. "That was what happened with Miss Paem."

"Aye," said the man. "That makes sense to me. But forgive my rudeness. I must introduce myself."

He bowed again. "I am called Egmont of Kalinovo, and I am at your service."


	19. Polovtsian Dances

Chapter 18 – Polovtsian Dances

Dear song of ours, take flight  
On the wings of time to our homeland  
Where we in life could sing you  
Where we in liberty could sing you!  
Under the cold and heavy sky  
Through air as thick as tar  
There to the fog on the lake  
The cloud-tipped mountains gaze with disdain  
Until the sun cuts through its mask  
And shaves the mountains clean  
Where grasses patch the orange valleys  
And owls sing praises to the moon  
And fruits in consonant harmony reply  
To there, dear song, to there you go  
To there, my song, to Kalinovo  
A kingdom that once flowered is lost  
A paradise is shuffled off  
A kingdom for a cry left hoarse  
As royal blood must run its course  
Usurper or successor then  
Must occupy the marble throne  
The house's path forever wending  
Down its dry yet bloodsoaked road  
Dear song of ours, take flight  
On the wings of time to our homeland  
Where it in life could hear you  
Where it in liberty could enjoy you  
Under the muddy purple sky  
Through air as clear as pitch  
There with fog in his eyes  
The jaded monarch gazes with disdain  
Until the knife cuts through his mask  
And shaves the country clean  
Where flowers patch a whitewashed tomb  
And crows sing praises to the moon  
And veiled faces in consonant harmony reply  
To there, dear song, to there you go  
To there, my song, to Kalinovo

When reared to his full height, Egmont of Kalinovo stood a head taller than Chrono. Almost unconsciously, Chrono took a step backwards when confronted with the sheer mass of the knightly figure before him. He had confronted knights before, but of those he had known at length, only one projected anything like the air of authority and confidence radiated from Egmont, and even he had done so through force of character rather than his small, amphibian stature.

Paem, too, appeared to marvel at the newcomer, though Coppelia seemed as unflappable as always. Paem took a moment to offer her hand to Egmont in greeting; he returned the gesture and added a slight bow to the end.

"Sir Egmont of Kalinovo," Chrono said, "I am Chrono, and my companions are called Coppelia and Paem."

Egmont turned to Chrono. "What brings you, young master, to the heart of this parched and aching land? You have the look of a warrior about you. Are you, then, of a mind to assist in the defense efforts?"

"Defense efforts?" Chrono echoed. "Has the invasion begun already?"

"Then you know of it," said Egmont, suddenly on edge. "Be warned that I am prepared to strike you down if you show any sign of aiding the hostiles."

Chrono took a step backward and waved his hands out in front of his body. "Whoa there! I think there is a misunderstanding. We're trying to help Qilin in defending against the invaders. We only heard of the attack when another force made an attack on lord Kuei."

Egmont's posture softened. "Very well then, young master. One sent by lord Kuei is one with whom I have no qualms joining in alliance against our common foe. Mayhap we might assist each other in passage across this wretched desert."

"Excellent idea, Sir Egmont," said Paem. "I surmise that you are aiding lady Qilin, yet I do not recognize you, and you do not recognize me.

"Should I?" said Egmont.

Paem stared directly into Egmont's face, mouth clasped shut in a frown of disapproval. "I serve directly under lord Kuei. Any valued lieutenant in this land would know of me, and most know my face."

"I offer my aid here on my own terms and for my own reasons," said Egmont. "I owe no fealty to lord or lady of this place as long as my erstwhile task remains unfulfilled. Until that time, I am a wanderer."

"Wanderers appear to be the rule rather than the exception these days," said Paem. "This bodes ill."

"And yet I intend no harm to those who have themselves done no harm."

Paem sniffed. "That's not what I meant. You don't seem particularly bad, at least as far as I can tell, but that you are here at all, at the same time as these other outlanders, strikes me as either an odd coincidence or something more sinister. Do you mind telling us why you are here and why you wish to aid lady Qilin?"

Egmont motioned for the entire party to sit down in a circle, and Chrono and Paem complied. Coppelia, for whatever reason, stood a half dozen feet away from the circle and made no attempt to appear interested in anything Egmont had to say, but Egmont ignored her and addressed Chrono and Paem.

"I come to this land I know not how." Egmont's voice adopted a low, wistful tone, as if it were painting his story rather than merely telling it. "Indeed, I know neither precisely where I am nor how I might return, if return to Kalinovo proves possible. For the time being, such as time can be in this place, I am no more than a wanderer ejected from his home and tasked with fulfilling a vengeance upon one known to haunt these lands, one whose malevolence once wrought the ruin of a kingdom.

"The one called Galitsky is my quarry, though I have not seen hide nor hair of him since the beginning of my journey. He is guilty of regicide, of a most foul and contemptible murder, and one from which the fair land of Kalinovo might never recover.

"But we must start at the beginning. Kalinovo was in the midst of a feud of succession. The king had no heirs, and each noble house sought to win for itself the favor of the crown so as to position itself before the others when illness or war finally took the old king. Those days were complete chaos. Hardly a day passed when one nobleman or another did not vie for the king's attention with sweetly poisoned words or gifts, all the while the noble houses fought amonsts themselves and spilled each other's blood in a manner fit more for savages than for those pretending at civilization. The only man keeping the whole of the kingdom from fracturing and falling in upon itself was the king.

"Long had I served in the royal court when this incident occurred. My loyalty to Kalinovo was as unwavering as the earth's slow circuit of the sun, as deep as the deepest trench in the basement of the sea, and as rich as the soil of the world's most splendid garden. The fall of my homeland cut me deeper than any wound ever inflicted by a sword, for I was there when it happened. I witnessed the murder of the king, and yet my old bones could not summon the strength to save him. One evening, one deceptively quiet evening, an assassin stole into the king's chambers, and before I could end him, he drew his blade and beheaded our monarch. And yet, he was no base man, this assassin. Little time had I to size up the situation, but there can be no doubt that it was Galitsky, himself a contender for succession to the throne, that cut down the king that night.

"The sound of the alarm brought the whole of the castle guard down upon him, but he somehow managed to escape through a portal to this realm, and where he went from there I intend to discover. I myself followed him out of a desire to avenge the headless kingdom.

"As for my present errand, I heard a rumor that someone very much like Galitsky might be found among the invasion force. If this proves true, then I might quench Kalinovo's bloodlust within the week. If it does not, then I will continue to search wherever I must until I accomplish my task. That is my story."

"A sad tale it is," said Paem. "Our ruling council has not known such treachery within its ranks, and for that I am grateful."

Chrono stood up. "If your goal is in line with ours, then we should make haste to meet with Qilin. We haven't mentioned this yet, but we, too, are interested in the invasion force. Coppelia believes her friend Orchid might be among them, though why a friend of hers would join the invaders is beyond me."

"Actually," Paem noted as she stood up to join Chrono, "we don't know why any of them are attacking. The why of it all is what I need to find out for myself, by order of lord Kuei. And, to be honest, I need to satisfy my own curiosity."

Egmont stood up last and most slowly, whether because of his age or his armor. "It is settled, then. At once, we must go."

XXX

Mile after mile of barren desert passed beneath Chrono's feet as he and the rest of his party trekked slowly but surely in the direction of Qilin's castle. Eventually, and to everyone's relief, the sand grew thinner, revealing hints of a foundation of solid red clay. Not long after that, the party came across a raised path made of similar material, running off over the horizon to the northeast and southwest.

Here the wind picked up, streaming more and more particles of sand into Chrono's face as he trudged doggedly onward. The winds howl was only broken by the cry of a far off bird, a scavenger whooping with joy while stripping bare a set of bones that once belonged to whatever animals hid out this far into the desert.

None of Chrono's companions said a word, but Coppelia had seemed especially quiet ever since they had come across Egmont. Something about the man must have left her uneasy, whether it was his sheer size, his formal dialect, or his exotic helmet. Reflecting on this matter left Chrono with a twinge of discomfort; while he sensed no ill will in the newest member of the party, he still preferred seeing the faces of those with whom he spoke, and Egmont had yet to remove his helmet for even a brief moment. Chrono thought about just how hot and stuffy the inside must have been, especially in the heat of the day in the middle of the desert, and winced.

The first real landmark Chrono encountered on this leg of the journey was a split in the clay path. Part of the road continued on in a generally southwest direction, while a branch bent directly south. Both disappeared over distant hills without revealing their destinations, and to Chrono's chagrin, no signpost offered a clue as to which fork to take. Chrono glanced over at Paem.

"I'm actually not sure which way is better," she replied. "I mean, I know what lies in each direction, but I don't know where we should be headed. Lady Qilin could be at either location."

"What are our choices, then?" Chrono wondered.

"The left fork leads to a city called God's Hand, the seat of the government here. It's a fairly nice place to be, with places to rest and water and everything, but if the invasion has already begun, then I fear we might be better off continuing along the right fork to the Yellow River Fortress. Likely lady Qilin would have moved there in event of war."

Chrono smiled. "Then our choice is clear. We should take the right fork, unless anyone else has a compelling reason not to. Anyone?"

Coppelia spoke for the first time in hours. "I believe, Mister Chrono, that we should go left."

"Why is that?"

Instead of answering, Coppelia merely gazed down the path at the horizon and prompted the others to do so as well. Their gaze was met by a faint wavering in the yellow-orange pattern of the sky that might have been some sort of smoke. The longer Chrono looked at it, the clearer the sight became.

"What is that?" he asked no one in particular.

"Sand," Coppelia replied. "Something is moving under the sand."

"I thought the sand had thinned out," said Chrono.

Paem knelt low to the ground and poked around her feet with her staff, leaving a light divot in behind. She poked harder and dug deeper. "The clay is only on the surface. Not only is the path here artificial, so is the rest of the ground. At one point this place was nothing but an ocean of sand until lady Qilin had something firmer installed over it."

Coppelia shuffled her feet and cocked her head, apparently listening to something. "Why, then, did the sand not bury the path even deeper?"

"Good question," said Paem. "In fact, it should have, but the clay surface is not as solid as it appears here. There are places for the sand to drain out if it builds up too high, emptying back into the sand reserves below. It's quite the engineering marvel, I say."

"Then something is forcing the underground sand up through one of those drains?" said Chrono. "It's like a sand geyser. This I want to see."

Chrono started off down the path in the direction of the cloud of sand, and Coppelia followed after him. Both began at a brisk walk but quickly settled into a run, eager to see what could cause so much of a disturbance below the ground. For a brief moment, an image of something else, something in a different time and a far away place, bursting through from underground and tossing chunks of earth up high into the air flickered through Chrono's mind, but with a shudder he forced the image away. Nothing like Lavos could exist in a place like this, could it? Besides, Lavos was dead. If not a gigantic subterranean monster, though, what could it be?

Chrono found his answer as he made his way to the top of the next hill. Looking down ahead of himself, he could see a hole in the ground surrounded by a swirling vortex of sand a hundred yards in diameter. From the hole Chrono could hear a sound like rushing water, as well as a deep rumbling from the belly of the earth. He could feel the ground beneath his feet reverberating.

As the vortex swirled around, sand fed into the center like a glass of water being chugged into a thirsty mouth. Bits of sand flew from the side of the circular flow, but most of the airborne particles came from the hole in the ground. Every few seconds, the opening in the earth belched up a cloud of granules much finer than those at the surface and also slightly lighter in color. The flying sand drifted out in all directions before falling back to the ground, most of it in the middle of nowhere but some of it on top of Chrono's head. He found himself brushing most of this away, but the gesture was futile.

Chrono felt a hand on his shoulder as Coppelia caught up with him, staring wide-eyed at the spectacle below. Soon Egmont and Paem joined them, and the sight of the whirling pool of sand enraptured the entire party for what felt like hours but was really only a matter of minutes.

Then the whirlpool collapsed on itself with a crash as loud as anything Chrono had every heard. Shards of clay mixed with the sand in the air, pelting him from the front and from above. Waves of sand rushed outward from the center of the crash, most of them breaking at the foot of the hill but some of them coming dangerously close to engulfing him and dragging him down to his doom. Several more crashes sounded out, each louder than the first, and shockwaves emanating from the epicenter shook Chrono's entire body, pushing him backwards onto the ground. As he struggled to his feet, he braced himself for more.

When the crashing noises finally appeared to die down, Chrono managed to regain a fully upright stance. Instinctively, he drew his sword. And then the rest of the ground in front of him caved in all at once, leaving an even larger hole. But not an empty hole.

A massive gray dome of what looked like animal skin breached the surface of the sand where the whirlpool had been, throwing more sand and clay into the air. The dome rose higher and higher, and when it reached the height of a two story building, a small, round head rose up from what Chrono guessed was the front, beady red eyes peering out from an elongated, dark recess below the forehead, sitting over a mouth filled with small, white, sharp teeth. From the creature's cheeks jutted two enormous tusks, like those of an elephant but much larger. To Chrono's utmost relief, the head stared off to the east, apparently oblivious of his party.

The monster rose nearly all of the way out of the sand, and then it began to move with a slow but incredibly noisy crunching sound, shoving its way through the land's clay shell, completely destroying the path to the city, and letting loose a roar that Chrono could feel deep inside his body. As Chrono tightened his grip on the handle of his sword, he felt Coppelia's fingers dig into his shoulder.

"We must follow," she said. "This is part of the invasion."

Chrono nodded but said nothing.


	20. Nimzovich's Defense and Capture

Chapter 19 – Nimzovich's Defense and Capture

The realm of wonders  
Apparent in picturesque towers and terraces  
Inside the old building, sparks of inspiration  
Beat old ideas into new  
New melodies dance to old rhythms  
As though calling to the future generations  
The dancers compete in song

Jinling Lan crept through Samsara's dark, abandoned suite over to her desk, swept a pile of crumbs off of the chair, and sat down. She silently scolded herself for pushing aside the crumbs and thereby leaving evidence that she had been in the room while Sam was away, but there was nothing she could do about it anymore, and as long as Sam had no reason to be suspicious, then she hoped a few crumbs would go unnoticed.

Another stab of guilt struck as she questioned why there would be crumbs on the seat of the chair instead of down beside it on the floor or over the keyboard, but Jinling wrote this off as paranoia. She had been careful so far, and Sam would have said something had she thought someone had been prying into her private computer files.

In any case, Sam was away at a conference for the weekend, and that meant the odds of being caught doing anything she wished in the room were relatively low, and even were they not, the allure of reading more correspondence with the mysterious Nimzovich overshadowed all else in Jinling's mind.

Jinling flipped the power button the computer and waited while for the first menu to pop up, prompting her to choose which boot pattern to use. Jinling picked the one she knew Sam used for her work, most of which she did on the less user-friendly operating system of her dual-boot system. A few seconds passed as the machine ran through its diagnostic checks and loaded up all of the system files, drivers, and other devices needed to keep itself running, and then it displayed a box asking for a login name and password.

This part would have been more of an obstacle to Jinling had she not planned carefully for the event. All of Sam's music was turned off at the moment, with her gone, but Jinling knew Sam would never trust herself to remember which piece to play when she came back. Thus, all Jinling needed to do was to play Sam's music playback device and identify the composer of the piece to which the machine would default.

Jinling fumbled around for the power switch to Sam's music player and leaned back as the desktop speakers immediately massaged her ears with the complex tonal work of a Wagnerian opera.

W-A-G-N-E-R, Jinling typed in at the password prompt, and the monitor went blue as the computer finished logging her in.

With less of an immediate threat of discovery hanging over her head, Jinling allowed herself a moment to soak in the music before she set about reading her friend's email history, but the strains of _Das Rheingold_ melted away and reality once more drew her in when she remembered that she should check the movement number of the recording so she could reset everything to the way it was when she finished.

Jining bit her lip as she strained her eyes at the liquid crystal display marking the passage of the music from one track to the next. Unable to make out the letters in the poor light, she tilted the monitor to the side and let it illuminate the numbers. Making a mental note to turn the player back to the third track, she continued with her investigation.

Opening Sam's email folder revealed more of the usual junk to sift through. A few departmental emails dotted a landscape of advertisements for products that probably did not exist, calls to give credit card numbers to random strangers, and requests to enter passwords and personal data at strange websites. Of course, there were a few emails Jinling herself had sent; most of these were nothing more than small talk to help the both of them survive long days of grueling research into the esoteric boundaries of knowledge, though a few of them contained series scientific questions.

None of this mattered much to Jinling so much as what Nimzovich had to say and why someone she had never met would take such an interest in Sam's mother. The whole world owed something to the genius of Lucca Ashtear, of course, but that hardly meant people bothered her daughter much, and most of Lucca's work could be found rather easily in any academic library. There had to bad some personal angle to all of this secret discussion, though just what it might be eluded Jinling.

At last, she found one of Nimzovich's emails. The content was relatively disappointing.

"1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. Qc2 d6 5. Bg5 Nbd7 6. e3 b6 7. Bd3 Bb7 8. f3 Bxc3+"

Jinling shook her head and scanned for more emails. The next one she found proved to be more enlightening.

"Samsara Ashtear,

"You are close to something big. I know it, and you know it. I also know what you are hiding, and I want in on it."

Jinling gasped, mildly surprised that her intuition had been correct. Something was up, and this Nimzovich fellow was not to be trusted. But why had Sam not told her? Jinling continued reading.

"I know about the working model, and I know your friend has been working on a prototype. I want to try it out, and if you don't invite me to do so, I'm going to come uninvited. This is bigger than either of us. This is the biggest breakthrough since the Ashtear Circuit, and you know it.

"I've been polite so far, but I only have so much patience. Don't snub me on this one. See you tonight.

"-Nimzo"

Jinling felt a trickle of sweat run down the side of her head, followed by a flood of anger. This creep had been stalking Sam! And for what, to scoop her results? What a lousy...

Jinling looked at the timestamp on the letter: 5 pm that very day. "See you tonight..."

Some instinct kicked on in Jinling's brain, whether a survival instinct or a protective, territorial instinct or a tribal urge to protect those people close to her, she wasn't sure, but she knew the next thing she had to do was to shut everything down and then run to where the prototype _Golden Days_ was being stored. No one was going to rob Sam—or Jinling!—of years of hard work, and no one was going to get hurt, except maybe the stalker.

In a flash Jinling had all of the computer's windows closed down, and she flipped the power off without even bothering to log out. Unsure of just how large or dangerous Nimzovich might turn out to be, she dug into the desk drawer, retrieved the small handgun that Sam kept there in case of emergency, and stuffed it into her jacket's inside pocket.

Before she could decide on a next move, a knock came at the door. At first Jinling thought it might be Sam, but why would she knock on her own door? It had to be someone else. It had to be Nimzovich. A quick survey of the room confirmed that there were only two ways out: the front door and the window. However, the window was considerably less practical, and she felt sure he would just follow her if she left that way. But did she have to leave?

She decided against it. The room's light was already off, thanks to her habit of keeping it dark while snooping (which, she realized, was not necessary while Sam was out of town, but which turned out to be a useful accident), so if she made absolutely no noise, maybe he would just go away.

Another knock sounded, this one louder and faster than the first. Jinling held her breath for as long as she could. When she finally had to breathe, she let air seep in through her nose as slowly as she could manage so as to avoid gasping for air and thereby making noise.

The visitor at the door knocked a third time. "Samsara Ashtear?" a male voice called. Something about the voice made the hair on the back of Jinling's neck stand on end. Her muscles tensed up, and she bit down on her tongue to keep herself quiet. She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her palms.

A fourth knock came, this one sounding like a heavy boot kicking the lower portion of the door. The voice behind the door swore violently, using mostly words that Jinling had never even heard before. As someone who had spent many long years in college, she figured she had heard just about all of the popular swear words, but this guy could make even her jaded ears bleed.

The front door's handle rattled and shook as Nimzovich shook it with all his might, cursing the knob, the door, the darkness, and Samsara. Finally she heard an extra powerful bang on the door, followed by the sound of footsteps fading down the hallway. Jinling waited a full ten minutes before daring to move again.

When she was confident that she was alone, Jinling sucked air into her mouth in thick, greedy gulps. She leaned her body forward, resting her hands on her knees, and then she sat down on the floor in the middle of the room, glad to have escaped without having to shoot anyone. She rubbed a clammy palm across her forehead and waited for her heartrate to slow before standing up again.

Moonlight shone in through the open window shade, casting a tall, powerful shadow image of Jinling across the floor of the room. Jinling pondered the image for a minute, imagining herself a famous inventor, an explorer, a pioneer of the unknown who had just overcome a life-threatening situation, victorious.

A lump formed in Jinling's throat, but it was one of pride and confidence, not fear.

But then, Nimzovich wanted the prototype, not Samsara, didn't he? She still needed to go protect her precious machine, protect it from that raving psycho who had just tried to break down Sam's door. Mustering up her courage, Jinling undid the door's lock, stepped into the hallway, relocked the room, and walked away, her pace quick yet controlled, her head constantly looking back over her shoulder.

Once outside her apartment, she looked around once again, although she felt slightly safer if she assumed Nimzovich had no idea what she looked like. He might have looked up Sam's picture, but what were the odds he would have bothered with her? In any case, she couldn't see anyone suspicious anywhere, much less anyone who look like he had just had a fit of door-kicking spasms.

The streets this time of night were surprisingly empty for a modern city the size of the Chronos Dome, and Chronos was even more modern than most. It had been founded by Balthasar himself as a research colony, but over the years it had grown into a college town and then a full fledged center of commerce, eventually replacing the orbital station as the site of the main campus of Balthasar University. The apartment complex where Jinling and Samsara lived was one of the older, plainer buildings located nearer the heart of the university. Parts of the building were even made of brick, like many of the highrises sharing the street. Inside they were modern enough to have locks and elevators and cooling systems governed by the best technology had to offer, but from the outside they looked like relics. They looked almost trashy, like the pictures of the 11th century Ashtear home Sam had shown Jinling a few times.

Asphalt streets, also relics, stretched in either direction, lined with more ugly, poorly lit brick buildings and uglier, darker alleys. Jinling walked as close to the street—and as far from the alleyways—as she could manage. Her goal was to get to the subway system, which could take her to the little laboratory she and Sam rented for their construction work. There was a station at the end of the block, so she did not have far to go.

A few mechamobiles whirred by as she walked, hands in pockets, down the side of the road. Light from the neon streetlamps hit her from several directions at once, and the split shadow patters, projected in four directions, reminded her of the moonlight image she had seen at the apartment. This kept her spirits up until she got to the stairway leading to the underground. Checking around her to make sure no one was following, she dipped through the shadowy entrance to the subway and followed the stairs into the main concourse, which was thankfully as bright as during the daytime.

Now feeling more relaxed, Jinling skipped the ticket lines, instead slipping her subway card through the terminal gate. When the correct train glided up, the green line northbound, she stepped on, sat down, and waited for her stop. She could not help but feel slightly nervous when looking at the sheer number of strangers, half of them hidden by newspapers, sitting all around her, but Nimzovich could not have predicted her train before she even got on, so she told herself to stop worrying. Somehow, though, even a nearby seat that was empty except for a computer magazine managed to appear threatening.

When she reached her stop, Jinling walked quickly through the exit and then hurriedly slid her subway card through the reader at the exit terminal. A few strides forward and a few glances backward, and she was at the exit, thus far without incident.

The neighborhood into which Jinling emerged was quite unlike the one where she lived for the simple reason that it was not so old. Renting property in the old district could be expensive, but the ever-expanding city welcomed development along its fringes, so she and Sam found a fairly affordable place for the practical portion of their work, nestled among modern, shiny metallic buildings, glowing advertisement screens, hip theater buildings, coffee shops, book stores, grocery outlets, music clubs, restaurants (oh, the restaurants!), parks, video amusement centers, animal habitat viewing outlets, convenience markets, indoor sporting arenas, concert halls, and more. Anything a young student might wish to do on a weekend could be found within a block of at least one subway station in one of the fringe districts, making Chronos one of the more attractive spots for upwardly mobile members of the younger generation.

Jinling's lab building's exterior did little to draw attention to itself. Lacking even a nameplate above the front door, none who did not know of the building's real purpose could have guessed it to be anything more than a storage facility, and that was one of its great virtues. About the only distinguishing feature on its front was a card reader on the door, connected to an electronic lock, along with an emergency keypad into which she could type the 15-digit pass code if she forgot her card. As crude as a numerical code might have sounded, it was truly only a last resort, as any attempt to enter a code, even the right code, would cause the lock to freeze for an hour, although the correct code would cause the door to open briefly first.

Jinling opened the front door with her card and peered in. A feeling in her gut told her that she ought to look out behind first before entering, but upon checking she saw no one. She sighed and closed the door behind her. It locked automatically, but she checked the lock just to be safe. Then she turned on the light.

In the middle of the room stood her greatest triumph, a machine surpassing even Balthasar's _Epoch_, the invention that would define her career once revealed to the public. It was her life's work, and to a lesser extent Sam's. Sam had other projects going all the time, but Jinling loved _Golden Days_ more than anything, and she worked on very little else.

Its outward appearance was simple. She had eschewed the clunky aerodynamics of the _Epoch_'s design, instead adding modern hovering technology like that used in mechamobiles to enable flight. She also made sure the cockpit was completely covered. This gave it the look of a subway car more than the look of the application of the greatest advance in temporal mathematics since the classic collaborations between Balthasar and Lucca, but when traveling through holes in spacetime, one rarely encounters outside observers, so making it look like something out of a bad science fiction movie landed somewhere lower on the list of design priorities. Not that Sam hadn't tried for something less practical.

Jinling once again allowed her muscles to relax and her heart to slow as she looked ahead at the machine and then back at the door one last time, finally satisfying her need to be perfectly sure Nimzovich had given up.

When she turned to face her machine again, she found herself staring directly into a face that was in the process of materializing, literally out of nowhere. For a split second, she saw the world's ugliest mouth contorted into an arrogant toothy smile. She had no time to process the stunning pistol held in the man's hand.

She didn't feel a thing as she lost consciousness.


	21. White Hot

Chapter 20 – White Hot

Chrono half expected the noise from the hulking sand monster to die down at least slightly at some point during his chase of the beast, but instead he could swear it actually grew louder. This made approaching the shell to attempt to pierce it with his sword more difficult the longer he put it off, and it was already next to impossible. His lightning magic also failed to slow down the monster, although he had not yet attempted Luminaire for fear of blasting a hole in the already unstable clay underfoot. He felt useless.

He was not alone in being ineffective, however. Even with his superior armor blocking out some of the particles of sand pelting the party rapidfire, waves of sand from the perimeter immediately around the monster's shell pushing him back far if he tried advancing. Coppelia, more nimble than Egmont by far, had a slightly better go of it, leaping over the worst of the ground waves, but she still could not overcome blasts of hot air and geysers of sand that periodically shot out over the edge of the clay surface, almost as if they were aimed at keeping her at bay, knocking her backwards and into the air as effortlessly as if she were a rag doll.

This left Paem as the team's primary attacker. She had shed her calm demeanor, staring intently ahead as she jogged to keep up with the monster's pace, staff drawn and glowing Dreamstone red. Her lip twitched slightly as a summoned shadow snake bit into the shell of the monster and recoiled. With a flick of her wrist, she triggered an explosion of shadow near the front of the monster's head. She then ducked to the side as a particularly large chunk of clay flew up from the abyss and nearly struck her head; her reflexes saved her, and it merely grazed her cap.

Paem's staff flashed even brighter red for a second, and another shadow explosion rocked the front of the the creature's head. Two more followed it, and for a second it looked as if they might actually have stunned their target. A high pitched screech tore through the air, like a stone scraping a chalkboard, and the monster actually slowed up slightly, but as soon as the noise died down the thing resumed its previous speed, still inching its way toward the city. A flurry of ground clay flew at Paem all at once, and she found herself forced to break off her attack and regroup with the rest of the party.

"I can't seem to hit it hard enough," she panted at Chrono. "Its shell is amazing."

Coppelia nodded, an odd gesture to make while running but one she somehow managed to make appear natural. "Indeed. It is very much like a tank. I would like to think that I could hurt it were I not limited in my reach, but its projectile defenses are seamless."

Chrono looked back and and forth between Coppelia and the monster, hoping an idea would surface in his mind, some tactic that could target some weakness, but nothing presented itself. The party's long range attacks could not penetrate the shell, and their short range attacks could not even reach.

"I think," he said, "we might have to wait this out. See if something comes up. Maybe there will be reinforcements from the city."

Paem and Egmont agreed, and the three of them retreated to a safe distance, relieved for the moment to be away from the brunt of the storm of sand particles and waves and wind gusts. Coppelia stayed behind and redoubled her attempts to leap onto the monster's back, but her efforts remained futile.

Chrono felt a burning sensation in is chest from all the running, and his legs ached, but he pushed ahead, fearful of falling so far behind the monster as to be unable to catch up. He shuddered to think what could happen to a city in the path of such a destructive force. Memories of Lavos flickered through his mind as if to taunt him, but he shut them out. Failure, whose cost could include many innocent lives, was not an option.

The only weapon remaining in his arsenal was Luminaire, but Chrono figured he would get at most one shot of that, and he did not intend to waste it until he was sure he could put it to good use, and "good use" in this situation meant making the monster dead, preferably without the risk of causing all of the surrounding ground to collapse and kill them all. Still, with nothing else working, he could not count out even last resort tactics.

The time chasing the sand monster felt like days to Chrono. Any minute, he knew either his egs or lungs would give out, and he'd be forced to take a break to regain his strength. Any minute, he or one of his friends could be hit by a chunk of rock or clay and knocked unconscious or worse. Any minute, some horrifying possibility could come true, and he'd find himself dead, not just in dead in a bizarre land beyond the End of Time, but dead in a bizarre land beyond the End of Time in a place even the residents considered to be the middle of nowhere! The middle of nowhere, as far from Nadia as he could imagine.

Chrono choked back a tear and stopped running. Gasping for breath, he hung his head.

He felt a hand on his back. A cold hand. For a minute, he imagined it was Nadia, and she was telling him that everything would be just fine. He's stumbled into a misplaced Gate and fallen back into the 11th century, ready to live out his days happily and peacefully. He could even hear her voice.

"Look up, Chrono," Nadia said. "Look up."

Drawn to his illusion, Chrono obediently followed the instruction. What he saw snapped him back to reality.

"Look up, Mister Chrono," Coppelia was telling him. He had not even seen her come over.

"Huh?" Chrono managed only the barest of responses before he caught a glimpse of the horizon, which was now dotted with small, distant people charging in his direction atop steeds that resembled camels. Bipedal camels, faster than any camel he had ever seen before, but camels nonetheless.

"Mister Chrono," said Coppelia in an inappropriately reassuring voice, "please follow me."

Chrono felt a tug on his arm. Coppelia had no intention of letting him stop to think before dragging him even farther away from the sand monster than he already was.

Just why she wanted him far away became clear when Chrono looked over at the monster, which was now surrounded by splotches of fire. Short bursts of flame spouted up from the sand around its head and then died out. These were followed by more as a volley of fireballs arced across the sky and struck the monster's shell. Chrono's first thought was that the mounted troops were some sort of squadron of archers firing exploding arrows, but another glance at them told a different story. The fire actually originated in the mouths of the camels, who spat it at the sand monster.

"Lady Qilin's city guard," said Paem. "We have reinforcements."  
"A most peculiar cavalry," noted Egmont.

Paem smiled. "Quite the beast of burden they ride, no? This battle is not over yet."

A fiery explosion rocked the ground near the monster. It responded by letting rearing back and letting loose a frightful roar. Then, to everyone's surprise, it countered the volleys of fire with a stream of lightning bursting forth from its mouth and striking the sand around where the city guard troops ran. With a loud bang, the clay surface broke into pieces and flew in all directions, scattering the camels and temporarily halting their attack. One of them panicked and began spitting fire in all directions, more or less at anything that moved.

Chrono watched in horror as one of the camel's fireballs grew larger and larger as it sped toward him. Fearful of either a direct hit or of an explosion from a near miss, he ducked over to the side and braced himself. His whole body went limp as he watched the endpoint of the projectile's path: Egmont.

Egmont, however, did not dodge or even flinch. Rather, he lashed out with his left arm, fingers spread wide, and let the fireball crash into his hand. The instant it did, the outline of a purple shield flickered faintly into view and then faded. Egmont staggered backwards as the fireball deflected off of the shield and into the air, landing a safe distance away.

"You can do that?" Paem asked. "That is useful to know."

Coppelia tugged on Chrono's arm again, insisting, "I know how we can beat this!"

"You do?" said Chrono.

"Please allow me to explain," said Coppelia, and she huddled the party together to explain her plan.

XXX

The monster's attention seemed to be wholly on the fire camels now, but no amount of flaming explosions could slow it down. It marched forward unflinchingly, driving the camel knights back with its lightning energy attack and bit by bit crushing ever more of the desert surface. Its unceasing march to the city of God's Hand was like that of an executioner slowly making his way to the gallows to bring the pitiful end to some sad prisoner, who can do nothing but watch and wait. Nothing so far could even stall the creature; at the back of everyone's mind sat the question of just what would happen if it reached its destination.

Most of the defenders of the city had naught by desperate thoughts on the whole matter, but the four in Chrono's party had one last desperate gambit to play before the worst could happen. Three of them ignored the fires, braved the waves of sand, and dodged the debris thrown up by the monster in an effort to get close enough to put their plan into effect. The fourth, Egmont, stood a fair distance away, eyes on the camel knights. When Chrono, Coppelia, and Paem had closed enough distance on the monster to be within throwing distance, they turned and began running parallel to it, at all times keeping far enough away to avoid the worst of the flying chunks of clay.

Soon enough, the monster let loose a lightning attack, and one of the fire camels panicked. As before, this led to a fireball being launched at Egmont, who stood his ground and prepared his shield. He let the fireball hit him at an angle that deflected it toward the monster.

The monster did not see it coming. With a loud crash, it impacted the sand directly in front of the monster's face, shooting flames into the air and throwing a cloud of sand and clay up in front of the thing's eyes. For a fateful second, the monster slowed itself to a crawl, waiting for the cloud of sand to clear so it could retaliate against the camel knights. In that second, it lost track of Coppelia, and that was when she made her move.

With a mighty heave, Coppelia threw Chrono nearly straight up in the air, up over the sand cloud, giving him a direct look at the top of the monster's head. Then, while in midair, Chrono took his chance and cast Luminaire.

The whole desert went white and silent. Chrono's heart nearly pounded its way out of his chest. He attempted to steady himself but could not do so while he still few through the air. Wind and sand buffeted him, stinging worse than ever. His eyes useless, Chrono pinched them shut to keep the sand out. His limbs flailed almost involuntarily. For a brief moment, Chrono found himself as helpless as he had felt since the first time he traveled through a Gate.

Then, with a thump, Chrono landed, hard, on his should. Ignoring the pain, he crawled to his knees and drew his sword. With his right hand, he plunged the sword as deep as it would go into the surface of his landing spot, and with his left hand he felt to see if the ground was moving. Slowly and deliberately, he opened his eyes.

Paem called to him from down below. Without even giving his eyes time to adjust back to normal levels of light, Chrono struggled to his feet and balanced himself against his sword. Although he could hardly hear her, Chrono could see Paem gesturing for him to move forward. He did so, taking as much time as he needed to make sure he did not slip and fall to his death. It took him nearly two entire minutes before he was able to stand directly above the monster's head, looking down on it from the top of its shell.

Chrono waved down to Paem and took his sword in both hands. He took a deep breath, tapped his foot three times, and them leaped forward into the air, tilting his body forward as he went. As he descended toward the monster's head, a rush of purple, blue, and black magical energy shot out of Paem's staff and collided with Chrono's outstretched sword, disappearing into the blade and causing it to emit a purple glow. Chrono had little time to appreciate the aesthetics of the technique, though. Nothing could stop his downward momentum as he plunged his blade into the top of the monster's head. After that, all Chrono could do was hold on for dear life.

The thing shrieked louder than ever before. It thrashed its head from side to side, tossing Chrono back and forth with each change of direction. Only Chrono's iron grip on his sword, still embedded in his foe's forehead, kept him from flying off to the side. The monster shrieked louder, and then it began shaking its head up and down while rocking its massive body from side to side. Chrono swung forward, twisted himself around so he faced the creature head on for the downward arc of his swing, and planted both of his feet ahead of him, kicking at one of the creature's ugly red eyes. Still gripping the sword, Chrono found himself flicked backwards and around nearly three hundred sixty degrees, twisting halfway through, and landing on his feet, facing forward, on top of the monster's head. Planting his feet as best he could, he drew his sword from the wound he inflicted and jumped as far forward as he could go, landing on some of the undisturbed clay in front of the monster. He then scrambled as far away as he could go while the monster finished its death throes.


	22. Discovered Check

Chapter 21 – Discovered Check

Samsara Ashtear, rising star in the field of temporal mathematics, stood in front of the front door to her apartment and fumbled for her keys. The dimly lit hallway in which she stood felt cozily quiet after a weekend of posters, of speeches, of free dinners in crowded rooms with colleagues, of giving talks and answering questions, of sleeping in a rollaway in a small hotel room shared by several other researchers from her university, and of more coffee than was good for her. After a weekend smack in the middle of the sharp edge of civilization, the soft, welcoming confines of her apartment complex were like a pillow in which she could lose herself, alone at last, in comfortable quiet. For a moment, Samsara could do nothing other than close her eyes and breathe in slowly, counting exactly four seconds each time she inhaled and four more while exhaling. After a count of twenty-four, she could feel her heart slowing and her mind unwinding.

The turn of her key in the front lock made a sound louder than any available white noise, most of which could be traced to nocturnal neighbors watching drama videograms on their home video monitors. The faint neighbor sounds became almost like light scratches against the surface of the atmosphere, themselves barely louder than the hum of the fluorescent light fixture overhead. The clang of the lock slipping open and the creak of the door's hinges temporarily topped all other sounds, and then they and most of the rest of the background noise faded as Samsara stepped into her room and closed the door behind her.

Glad to be home, Samsara wasted no time in kicking off her shoes, dumping a bowl of popcorn into her microwave over and turning it on, and pattering off to her bedroom to change into more comfortable, less showy night clothing. She picked a light green heavy t-shirt and a pair of darker sweat pants, slipping them on just before her popcorn finished. Back in the main room, she retrieved her popcorn bowl and slumped down onto an overstuffed, tattered, purple couch nestled into the comfortable corner next to her own home video monitor. A few mouths full of hot, buttery, salty snack later, she shoved her hand under one of the cushions and clawed around until she located the monitor's long-distance operational control device. She then flipped on the local news.

_Stocks were up today, with big gains in the tech industry. PrinTemps, subsidiary of BalthaCom, gained two percent, while competitor…_

Samsara half listened, half replayed highlights from the conference in her memory. By the time the news program finished the business headlines, she found herself both out of popcorn and quite thirsty, so she reluctantly pried herself from her seat and plodded back to the kitchen, which was really more a corner of the main room. What neon lighting could reach her from the outdoors mixed with the blue from the video monitor to give her just enough vision to find a bag of instant noodle mix. She dumped the contents in a bowl, added a pinch of spices, and put the microwave back to work before opening the refrigerator to find something to quench her thirst, eventually deciding on a bowl of thin poi mixed with milk and coconut with slices of banana, her mother's favorite.

Work could wait; at that point Samsara cared only about winding down and forgetting work, just for an evening. She let the newscast continue.

_…won tonight, defeating the Arris Argonauts 7-2 to move into first place in the Zenan division. Tomorrow's matchup features…_

Samsara felt the urge to sleep tugging at her, but she shrugged it off and took a sip of poi.

_…but efforts to recover the kitten have been fruitless thus far. Authorities urge residents to…_

Samsara looked around, half cognizant of something wrong with the scene, but she shrugged the feeling off as nothing more than the paranoia she felt after every conference. Hundreds of people, all of them working on the same problems she wanted to solve first, all of them eager to publish before she could—it was no wonder these things made her want to curl up on a couch with some food to help her forget.

_…and that's all for tonight. Join us at six tomorrow for your morning EpicNews. Next is the Late Night Show._

Finishing her noodles, Samsara curled her feet up onto the couch (something Jinling would scold her for doing, surely) and shifted her back over to the side cushion, letting her head lean back against the arm rest at an angle that still allowed her to see her monitor. She stared halfheartedly as the news desk vanished and the set of a comedy variety show replaced it. Onscreen, a large man in a square suit and a loud tie told a few jokes about national politics while a robot band played along, made up of crude imitations of the R-XXY series, provided the music. Samsara chuckled at one or two of the better jokes, and she smiled a bit at seeing the old, rusty robots. While none of the leaps in technology required to create the series in the comedian's band would have been possible without Lucca, she still couldn't help but wonder how the world would react when she finally marketed her newer model. Much slicker. Much more useful. Much better with a saxophone.

Jinling hated this show, but she didn't seem to be complaining, perhaps because she was already asleep in her own room and perhaps because she was out late working. Samsara imagined it was work, anyway, even though it just as easily could have been something more frivolous. She preferred to give her friend the benefit of the doubt to cover up any guilt she might have over holding someone else up to the standards only an Ashtear normally had to deal with. Samsara never quite decided whether the pressure to live up to her name had helped her or hurt her.

Samsara pondered the question, hanging halfway between wakefulness and dream. The videogram of the comedian droned on, eventually giving way to an interview between the host and the author of a new book on robotics. Eventually the sound of the comedian's voice and the smell of the warm fruit and milk and the texture of the cushion lulled Samsara just over the threshold, and she drifted off into blissful sleep.

XXX

Samsara woke to the sound of the EpicNews morning host discussing minutia of this year's shipment of crops from El Nido. Groggy, she nearly forgot she had a mostly empty bowl of leftover poi balanced on her ribcage, which nearly fell off onto the floor as she started to get up to fetch her morning dose of chemical stimulants. The beginning of the new week after a conference promised something of a grind at work, with all the excitement dead and only the drudgery of cleaning up loose ends before starting on new experiments to look forward to until at least midway through the week. Samsara actually wondered if she would be missed if she were to stay home, but she did not pursue that line of speculation to its inevitable disappointing conclusion, at least not before having a cup of hot tea.

Morning tea had to be Samsara's favorite smell in the world. At that point in the day, just after shaking off sleep and before letting the rest of her responsibilities pull her attention in a half dozen directions at once, she could concentrate on absolutely nothing but her tea. Satisfied for the time being with a packet of instant tea, she filled her favorite cup with water, heated it up, and dropped two packets of black leaves into the brew, dangling them in and out of the surface to stir her drink up and darken it. Mint flavored steam rose from the cup and filled her nostrils. Staring intently at the top of the cup, she sniffed it until her eyes began to water. Only when she was completely satisfied with the drink's color and smell did she take a sip off the top.

At 6:15, her alarm clock sounded. She let it ring for a minute before leaving her tea behind to turn it off. When she did leave, she found herself jogging into her room, half because of the light feeling her tea inspired in her and half because she remembered that the alarm could easily be heard from Jinling's room, so she wanted to stop the sound as quickly as she could.

That accomplished, she decided to get ready for work. After changing into typical laboratory clothing, she brought her tea over to her computer to finish it while reading any mail she might have received over the weekend. A few people would surely have questions about the talk she had given at the conference, so she might as well file those questions away to answer later. Hardly thinking about what she was doing, Samsara pushed the power switch and waited for the computer to boot up.

She frowned. After the boot prompt, the computer told her she had forgotten to do a manual shutdown last time she had used it, but that was something she never forgot. Maybe she just hadn't been thinking before the conference, with everything so hectic. Shoving the problem to the back of her mind, she entered her user ID at the next prompt and then pushed the power button her music player—she was in no mood to try to recall her password from memory, as often as she changed it. Turning the volume knob, she waited for a recognizable melody to waft out from the speakers. Idly, she wondered whether even the sound of the world's greatest music could compete with the smell of morning tea, but she decided nothing could be gained by comparing that apple to that orange, so she pushed her attention to the sounds.

No sounds came.

She turned the volume up higher, but still she could hear nothing. She was sure she hit the power switch; she had heard the click that confirmed it. Somehow, though, there was no music.

Slightly miffed, she looked over at the player and noticed no display on the screen. For some reason, the player was not turned on. It was as if the player's switch had been in the 'on' position all weekend, and she had just flipped it back off without thinking.

Samsara shrugged and flipped the switch again. She listened for something familiar, but instead she heard one of the less familiar movements from _Das Rheingold_. It took her a minute to realize what it was. Normally, she would have left the player on one of her favorite movements so she could retrieve her password more easily. More annoyed by the minute at her carelessness before rushing off for the weekend, she typed in her password and brought up her mail.

Most of the emails were new but expected, but one in particular, one that was already marked as having been opened and read, caught her attention. Nimzovich's.

Samsara grunted as she clicked the screen to read the message. As she read it, she felt her vision blur and her heart rate speed up, effectively canceling out the morning breathing exercises she had forgotten to do anyway.

She called for Jinling, but no one answered. Someone had clearly been in the apartment, possibly someone dangerous. Concern for her friend shoved itself to the front of her consciousness.

She called again, and still she received no answer. Thoroughly worried, she discarded all sense of politeness and ran into Jinling's room, not caring at all if she woke her. When confronted with nothing but an empty bed, covers folded neatly (or what passed for neatly, with Jinling), she ran back out and threw open her desk drawer, frantically looking for her gun.

She called her friend's name again. When she could find neither Jinling nor the gun, she began to panic.


	23. Amor Fatis

Chapter 22 – Amor Fatis

Chrono strained his head around to get a better look at the dying monster behind him. Its cries, though still loud, diminished steadily in volume as the thing sank lower and lower into the sand. Its head continued to flail from side to side, but with less intensity than it had only seconds earlier. Its mouth hung open like that of a giant fish caught in a hook, while its eyes, once proud and menacing, stared out from the cavity in its upper head with an almost innocent dullness, a resignation in the face of a superior opponent. For a second, Chrono almost felt like shedding a tear for it.

Chrono staggered a bit as he stumbled back toward his travel companions. Through bleary, sand-clouded eyes he could just see Paem cheering for him, and he felt a jolt as she slapped him on the back in celebration. Coppelia shook his hand with the same verve and vigor with which she did everything, almost even managing a victory smile. Even Egmont appeared to be taking in the moment, his head turned toward the monster in a contemplative stare and his hands resting on the hilt of his blade, which he had jabbed into the ground in front of him. Chrono allowed himself a deep breath.

One breath was all he could manage, however; before he even had a chance to brush some of the sand out of his hair, the ground beneath his feet began to shake more violently than it had even in the heat of battle. Chrono felt his feet knocked out from under him, and he splashed face first down in the sand. He scrambled to catch hold of solid clay with his hands so he could regain his bearings, but the quake intensified and buffeted him back and forth along the ground. His eyes shut tight to keep the sand out and his hearing overwhelmed by the loud rumbling coursing through the earth below, he found himself completely cut off from his senses, and a stabbing pain began to grow somewhere inside his forehead. The blackness in front of his eyes gave way to splotches of red and purple and eventually a shrill white, and his consciousness threatened to steal itself away at any moment.

Battered and bruised, Chrono almost could not feel when something grabbed at his torso from above, lifting him in the air and violently dragging him away. Which direction, he could not tell. Thoughts of giant gnarled claws inching out of the hole in the ground, grasping him like a mouse caught in the paw of a hungry cat, and dragging him into the unknown underground filled his already distraught mind, inducing a nervousness he rarely felt even in battle. All attempts to free himself proved in vain as his limbs refused to respond to their usual commands. Even his mouth failed to obey; he tried to let out a scream of frustration, but the sand-choked air around his head drowned out his cry.

At least whatever was carrying him had lifted him off the ground, so the shaking clay no longer pounded his legs, chest, and face into uselessness. A small glimmer of lucidity returned, allowing Chrono to consciously let himself go limp until he recovered enough to fight. His head throbbed, but not as much now, and managed to tune out the better part of the noise. Even that seemed to be getting lighter the longer he waited, as did the stinging sensation from the sand hitting his face. Finally, Chrono forced his eyes open.

He was immediately greeted by a clear view, not of the monster nor of the underground, but of the hazy yellow sky directly above him. Bending his head forward, he caught a glimpse of the monster, but now it was fading away into the distance behind him, while below the sand flew by beneath his feet. Chrono was being dragged backwards away from the site of the battle! Relieved, he let some of the tension melt away and waited patiently for strength to return to his legs.

As the distance between Chrono and the monster grew, so did the quality of the air. Eventually, Chrono found himself able to breathe normally. Around this time, his captor slowed to a halt and gently dumped his body on the sand, propping his shoulders up until he was in a sitting position.

Someone called his name, and the voice rang slightly familiar, though far-off and dreamlike.

"Chrono?" it said. "Chrono? Wake up!"

A face appeared in front of him, at first blurry and indistinct but then coalescing into something he could interpret. It was…

"Nadia?"

"Chrono?" said the face.

"It's…" Chrono managed

But it wasn't her. When the face finally settled into a clear image, Chrono saw, to his disappointment, not his true love, but someone he was not expecting. It was Disenchantment, his fairy guide.

"It's you?" Chrono's voice betrayed some of his displeasure, with a hint of surprise that she was still alive.

Disenchantment's face laughed. "Who else would it be? Did you perhaps expect an old friend, as opposed to a recent acquaintance? Regardless, you are speaking to me and not to your love, and you must make your peace with that fact, if there is indeed peace to be made with it. Have I lost you?"

Chrono groaned.

"You've wandered far since our meeting, have you not? Instead of being lost in a cave, you are now lost in a desert! Is that not the funniest thing?"

No answer came immediately to Chrono's lips, so he shook his head as best he could and stared back into Disenchantment's eyes.

Disenchantment giggled softly. "We cannot all possess a sense of humor, I suppose. Oh well. I just thought you would like to know that I found you, and I will eventually come to get you. Are you looking forward to that?"

"Come to get me?" Chrono echoed.

"Yes," said Disenchantment. "I did say that, did I not? The timeless years may or may not have been kind to me, but I can still remember what I say a few seconds after I say it. This I said, and this I mean. I will come to get you at some point."

"But…"

"But I am already here, you protest? I am both here and not here, truth and fiction, and one becomes the other in this land of existence and nonexistence. The real and the unreal become lost, mixed up, in this land of illusions and dreams. Or are you tired of that game?"

The face in front of Chrono winked at him and smiled, devilishly.

"Illusion and dreams, the reason you need someone like me to sort things out. Do you not think so?"

Chrono sighed.

"Have you forgotten so soon? Did you think I perished in that dark and uncomfortable cave? Why would I allow my end to come in such a place? Why would I allow my end to come at all before I do I as promised I would? I will bring you to meet with the Princess of the Dead, and this will happen regardless of any desire you may have to see her or not. Fighting me, fighting fate, will do nothing to change this."

A hint of a smile, a proud smile, edged onto Chrono's mouth. "I've fought fate before and won."

"Did you, now? Or did you flow with the rest of things, down the natural course of the river of time to is inevitable destination? Was there any way you could have avoided changing history the way you did?"

"I defeated Lavos because I wanted to."

Disenchantment laughed. "Wanted to, or had to? I know who you are, Chrono, and I know you could never see such a horrid end to all things without taking arms against that which brought it about. To do anything else would not have been you. With you, to help others is as natural as a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond. Are you happy to hear of rivers in this place? Are you pleased to know that the river of time can flow even in the middle of the driest desert? If this idea pleases you, then you should thank me for telling you."

As Chrono peered behind the talkative face at the sky and the sand, his eyes grew watery, and the landscape swirled and melted and mottled until the sky had turned a delightful azure and the sand he morphed into a lush green garden, dotted with the pink and blue and yellow and red and orange of all the flowers Nadia had ever shown Chrono, the air sweet as honey and the distant trees rustling musically. Through the middle of the scene ran a trickle of water, cold refreshing water, and before Chrono even knew what was happening, he was on his feet lapping voraciously at it, scooping as much of it into his mouth as he could fit in his hands, which had apparently shed their covering of sand and dirt at some point.

"This pleases you much," said Disenchantment. "I like that I have that sort of power over you. Power pleases me, and knowledge is as power here. Also within my grasp is the knowledge that the two-sided nature of things persists even here. Your cool stream is but one side of reality. Witness its antipodal nature!"

Chrono hardly heard a thing Disenchantment said, his attention to the garden's water was so focused, but he took notice when a burning sensation welled up in his chest. Pulling himself up from the water, he saw the entire garden gone, replaced by crags of black igneous rock, the air ashen and heavy, and the stream now a gurgle of fire. The heat in Chrono's stomach spread to his lung and then outward to his fingertips. He pulled his head back and shouted at the sky, a tongue of flame escaping his throat and licking the air in front of him as he did. His fingers grew hotter and hotter until they reached their bursting point, at which they caught fire and melted off. The fire spread to his upper arms and torso, and before long his chest began to burn, and his face began to crack and peel and drip onto the ground.

A scream tore through the air, and Chrono was not even sure it was his. Disenchantment laughed.

"Do you see now what it means to be in a dream?"

Chrono squeezed his eyes shut to escape the pain. When he opened them, his body was whole again, he was no longer ablaze, and he was back in the desert.

"You…" Chrono began, but he found no suitable thing to say.

"I am here and I am not here, just like the garden and the river of fire. Just like you. Later, I will be both here and not here while being there with you, and we will go to the here and not here that is the Castle of Dreams, where your Princess awaits. In the meantime, you may encounter these other places that are not places, and you may drink your fill and be burned, either way. As I told you that I am your guide, I decided it was my duty to inform you ahead of time, and I must also apologize for not mentioning the desert. That was careless of me."

"Am I, then…?" Chrono almost managed a question.

"You are still in the desert, and you are still in the woods, or at least you are not yet out of the woods. This I mean metaphorically."

"Which?"  
Disenchantment's head laughed and spun playfully in a circle. "If I told you that, I might ruin the fun. Until next time, then, please keep me in your mind!"

Chrono clutched his temples with both of his hands, pressing against his forehead and rubbing. As he did so, the dream image of Disenchantment faded out into a blur and then into nothing, and in its place Chrono saw only the bleak desertscape, the remains of his battle with the monster, and his weathered body, covered in sand and bruises, arms at his side and feet stretched out in front of him. The feeling of something propping his shoulders up remained as he woke completely from his sleep, only to be greeting by another voice calling his name.

"Mister Chrono?" said Coppelia from behind him. "Mister Chrono? Are you now awake?"

Chrono shook off the dream as best he could and leaned back, sighing.

"I'm awake now, Coppelia. What happened back—?"

And in the distance, back where the monster had fallen, a fireball erupted from the ground, red flames leaping hundreds of feet into the sky, smoke billowing out like a mushroom, clay and sand flying in all directions, and a shockwave spreading out and tearing up the desert floor as it went. Chrono made himself ready for the impact.

When it hit, the shockwave knocked Chrono backwards, but Coppelia managed somehow to dig her feet into the sand and stay upright, enabling her to help Chrono back to his feet. Before Chrono could even become annoyed at losing his footing yet again and getting another coat of sand stuck in his hair, he stole a glance at the smoke rising from the explosion, and even in his current state, shaken by visions and battles and earthquakes and the heat of the desert, what he saw surprised him.

Out of the remains of the slain monster climbed a pack of Golems. Dozens of the them, and then hundreds, spun through the air, galumphed across the sand, some of them running straight to the City of God's hand, some of them in the direction of the Yellow River Fortress.


	24. En Passant

Chapter 23 – En Passant

Samsara's first several thoughts after the onset of panic proved useless, so she suppressed her instinct to analyze every angle of the situation until she could have another cup of tea. Though it could not calm her down completely, the smell and taste of hot peppermint eased her mind just enough to allow her to focus again, and focus was important to her if she was to have any chance of finding the rational way to respond to the new turn of events.

She reviewed what she knew. Jinling was gone. She had apparently gone in a hurry, as she did not even leave a note saying where she would be. That in itself would not be anything out of the ordinary if it did not appear that someone had stolen Samsara's gun from her desk, her computer may have been used without her permission, and Nimzovich had sent a threatening letter claiming to be coming for her. All told, things looked grim.

When she finished her tea, Samsara began to pace back and forth across the floor of the main room of the apartment. Pacing helped her think, or so she thought. If nothing else, it gave her frustration some outlet, freeing the rest of her mind to concentrate on her problems. Some of her best ideas had come to her while pacing.

The best she could come up with now, though, was to sit down and approach the problem methodically, and to Samsara that meant writing down everything she knew on a scrap of paper and looking for some common thread among the different parts. Fetching a few loose leaf sheets from her bedroom and a pencil from the pencil cup on the counter next to the microwave, she sat down at the dining table and scratched a barely legible title to her page: "Problem: Missing Jinling."

Underneath, she wrote down all of the clues she had: the letter, the computer issues, the missing weapon, the timing of her conference, and her scant knowledge of Nimzovich. After a brief pause, she drew a line between Jinling's name and the computer section.

Only Jinling would have the guts to break into her computer right in the middle of her apartment, right? She could understand someone else attempting to do so, but why would that happen locally? If Nimzovich had wanted to steal data on her projects, he would have attempted to access them remotely, and surely he never would have figured out her password system. Jinling might have.

Another moment and another thought passed, and Samsara drew another line between "computer issues" and "Nimzovich's letter." Why else would Jinling have been so careless as to let her break-in be discovered? Clearly, she left in a hurry, forgetting to shut the computer down properly, or perhaps intentionally leaving a clue indicate to her that something was wrong. That would mean someone unwelcome had been around, likely Nimzovich himself, and the visit had scared Jinling enough to raise the possibility in her mind that she would not be coming back. Soon, Samsara corrected herself. Jinling would not be coming back soon. But she would surely return eventually. Everything would work out in the end.

Samsara drew another line between the letter and the gun, and then another between the gun and Jinling. Had Nimzovich visited the apartment and had Jinling not trusted him, surely she would have thought to arm herself! While she knew something was amiss, explaining why she was careless with the computer, that also means she had time to think and to act on her thinking. And if she knew she was in danger, then she would have known better than to be unarmed.

This line of thought comforted Samsara somewhat. Yes, her friend was completely unaccounted for, and yes, she had been missing long enough for the situation to be suspicious, but Jinling was anything but a helpless damsel! She could handle herself in an emergency, and no matter what life threw at her, she could be confident that Jinling could outwit whoever her opponent might be. Even Nimzovich, as renowned as he might think he was in his field, would meet his match if he dared oppose someone approaching the heights of genius normally reserved for the Ashtears.

But something was still wrong. While Samsara's reconstruction of the scene fit fairly well with most of the clues she had uncovered, one question, one very important question, remained unanswered: why was Jinling gone? Two questions, maybe. Where did she go? Or could those be dissolved into one question? Samsara shook her head and tried to concentrate on forming an answer rather than reformulating the question. Why, with no sign of a struggle but definite signs of danger, would Jinling have left? Could it have something to do with why Nimzovich came in the first place?

"To test the prototype," Samsara recited, recalling the letter from Nimzovich. Which one, she wondered. Nimzovich was into robotics, after all, and she herself had made a few advances in the field that might have piqued his interest enough to cause him to drop by. His letter, however, indicated someone else's work. Jinling's, of course, and she only worked on…

Samsara jumped up from her seat and ran to her room to throw on whatever day clothes she could find, which turned out to be her black jogging shorts, a heavy brown long-sleeved undershirt, a lighter tunic with a solid leather belt to which she clipped a waist pack full of incidental travel items, a pair of sturdy leather boots, a protective helmet with a radio earpiece built into the side, and her work satchel. Not wanting to go defenseless, and with her gun stolen, she dug her work hammer out of her closet and slipped it into her satchel. Dressed, armed, and ready for action, Samsara made her way outside and ran to the subway.

On the way to her lab, she listened to her radio.

XXX

_This is an EpicNews Radio Edition special report._

_We are now receiving reports that management of the Chronos Dome has changed. A longstanding charge of corruption has come to light regarding Mayor Logan Kimble. The Mayor had been receiving bribes from interest groups looking to control a portion of the city budget, including money, cars, real estate, and company stock. Investigation into this scandal has been ongoing for several months, unbeknownst to the Mayor. When confronted with the charges this morning and the mounting evidence against him, he resigned, somewhat mysteriously. Historical precedent has been for besieged elected officials to fight charges like these, so some have been calling for a more detailed investigation into just what would prompt an immediate resignation._

_An interim executive officer has been chosen from the City Council and will be instated immediately into the position of Acting Mayor until a more permanent selection can be made. Citizens are urged to treat the Acting Mayor as a full-ranking public official with all the authority normally reserved for an elected Mayor._

_The new Acting Mayor is Councilman Fredrick Vanderkam, of the university district. Vanderkam, a former computer science student at Balthasar University, has vowed to run a mayoral office clean of all corruption and decadence. He will be giving his first press conference at 10:00 this morning. Stay with EpicNews Radio Edition for a live broadcast of the new Acting Mayor's first address to the Chronos Dome._

_Again, Mayor Kimble has resigned and replaced by Acting Mayor Fredrick Vanderkam. This has been a special report of EpicNews Radio Edition. Further bulletins as events warrant._

XXX

Politics bored Samsara even at the best of times. The reports of the scandal at City Hall did little to draw her mind away from the more immediate concern of whether or not Nimzovich had somehow gotten into her laboratory. City officials and corruption charges had been in the news for as long as she could remember, and they had never affected her before, so why should the latest newsflash have any relevance for her now, other than as a distraction?

Samsara chided herself for letting her mind wander, and she practically jumped off the subway as soon as she reached her destination. She emerged into the hubbub of a district amidst upheaval. News of the new management in the local government had apparently spread to the throngs of students who frequented the district for its coffee shops and entertainment venues, and a few of them had started an impromptu protest against either the old mayor or the new acting mayor. Samsara actually could not tell which; all that was obvious from observing the rioting students was that they were angry at someone in government, or perhaps at everyone in government, or perhaps at the institution of government itself, and they were taking their anger out on the poor ears of anyone within shouting distance. A few members of the police force held the larger clusters of students at bay with clear plastic shields and robotic police drone robots, so the area never really descended into total chaos. What instability there was still worried Samsara enough that she quickened her pace in an attempt to get to her lab as soon as she could.

She did not make it all the way before she was stopped by a protester shoving a hastily printed leaflet in her face and demanding to know why she had not joined the students.

"Acting Mayor Vanderkam is a crook and a liar!" he shouted at Samsara.

Resisting the urge to retort that everyone at City Hall is likely a crook and a liar to some degree or other, Samsara ignored him and tried to walk past. The protester, looking a bit hurt by her indifference, stepped in front of her and threw another leaflet at her head, apparently expecting her to catch it or read it as it fell to the ground.

"Wherever you are going is not as important as what we are doing here!" he insisted. "Did you know that Vanderkam never graduated from college, despite claiming to? He never offered proof of his diploma even when confronted. Some of our sources even suspect he never even provided valid residency documentation. Doesn't that concern you, or are you not a concerned citizen?"

Samsara tried again, in vain, to get around the protester, and again he blocked her.

"This is only the first step to complete ruin for the city we know and love. Please, listen and get involved. It's our only chance!"

Samsara sighed and stopped moving. "Look," she said, "I am in a hurry to meet my friend, and I do not wish to keep her waiting. Although I seriously doubt today's news will affect me at all, I will take one of your leaflets if you will just let me pass. Please?"

The protester thought this over for a second, then he smiled and nodded, handing her a slip of pink paper with a political screed printed on it. "Here you go, young lady. I hope you take the time to read it. I really do. This is a more serious matter than you seem to think it is, and we can only win this fight by changing one mind at a time."

Samsara snorted. "I'm sure that's completely true and not at all biased in favor of your preferred political party. Now, would you please let me pass so I can go to work?"

"Work? You said you were going to see a friend!"

"I'm going to see a friend at work. We work together."

The protester had no response for this, so Samsara stuffed the leaflet into her satchel, stepped around the dumbfounded guy, and hurried off before she could be bothered by anyone else on her way.

When she finally arrived at her building, she dug her card out and ran it through the scanner, and she hurried through the laboratory door. Inside, she flipped on the light and looked around. Her heart sank.

The room was nearly the same as it usually was after a workless weekend, but for two key differences. One was a puddle of what looked like dried blood in the middle of the floor near the front door. The other was the timeship _Golden Days_, which was missing.

Samsara fought back the urge to curse out loud. Instead, she stomped her right foot as hard as she could against the cement floor, her boot making a clapping sound that reverberated throughout the room. Her anger not mollified, she reached into her bag, pulled out her hammer, and smashed it against the nearest wall, repeatedly, until the recoil made her hands numb and she dropped the hammer to the floor.

Sinking to her knees, she huffed and puffed and spat a few unladylike phrases into the gloomy emptiness around her until she finally caught her breath.

_What now?_ she asked herself.


	25. YumYum

Chapter 24 – Yum-Yum

Chapter 24 – Yum-Yum

_Three little maids from school are we  
__Pert as a schoolgirl well can be  
__Filled to the brim with girlish glee  
__Three little maids from school_

_Everything is a source of fun  
__Nobody's safe, for we care for none  
__Life is a joke that has just begun  
__Three little maids from school_

_Three little maids who, all unwary  
__Come from a ladies' seminary  
__Freed from its genius tutelary  
__Three little maids from school_

_One little maid is a bride, Yum-Yum  
__Two little maids in attendance come  
__Three little maids is the total sum  
__Three little maids from school_

_From three little maids take one away  
__Two little maids remain, and they  
__Won't have to wait very long, they say  
__Three little maids from school_

- Three Little Maids by William Schwenk Gilbert, as displayed on Chrono's sword

The first flood the desert had seen in what passed for centuries beyond time was made of Golems. Hundreds of them poured out from the site of the destroyed monster, which was now little more than a hole in the sand with a pillar of smoke and flame emanating from it, huge balls of rock with beady eyes and unearthly teeth and tiny arms and legs designed for manipulating tools and mouths that could swallow a grown man. Onward, unceasingly they trudged, shoulder to shoulder and in queues hundreds of Golems long, marching in uniform rhythm at times and cacophonously at other times, stony feet shaking the desert and shattering what little calm the demise of the desert monster temporarily brought to the scene. Those nearest to the hole in the desert floor marched most haphazardly; they fell slowly into line as they had time to organize, as if they were guided by some invisible general issuing marching orders to those Golems already crossing the top of the sand.

Hundreds of eyes, all somewhere in between dead and lively in a way that seemed somehow appropriate for the halfway land Beyond Time, stared forward as their owners continued their relentless march. Only a few dared, or bothered, to look away from their distant target. Inherent in the swarms of Golems was a sort of single-mindedness, as if the entire horde shared only one brain and only one focus of attention, a monomind as mechanical as their movements both in singularity of purpose and in precision of its calculations. Each Golem was a perfect automaton, a servant utterly bent to its master's will, a well-designed cog in a deadly machine. The rhythmic thumping of the feet of the Golems against the sand, hundreds of feet at once, was the machine's heartbeat.

The Golems marched at first in two separate formations, one line of them moving straight for the city of God's Hand and the other curving down the path to the Yellow River Fortress. For a time the two groups were identical in every respect except for the direction of their marching, but after a while they fell out of synch just enough that they could be distinguished by the timing of their footfalls as well; each group hit the ground simultaneously with the collective force of a thunderclap, the first army's footfalls the bolt of lightning itself and the second army's, its echo of thunder, with the thunder's timing moving gradually away from the rhythm of the lightning as if the storm were really drifting across the desert and away from Chrono.

All of this left Chrono completely unable to think of an appropriate way to respond. Clearly, the Golems were a threat to the land, the real invasion force hiding behind the sand monster, and clearly they had to be stopped somehow, but their sheer numbers left him feeling powerless. He could easily fight several Golems himself, even at the same time. On a good day, he reasoned, he could taken on a dozen or two, maybe even a hundred (and here he had to caution himself not to get carried away), but in front of him he could see thousands upon thousands of them, and their ranks continued to grow every second. More came from underground faster than he could stop the ones he could already see.

A shiver broke through the desert heat and ran down Chrono's spine as he continued to stare, utterly enthralled, at the endless armies of Golems, his ears ringing with the noise of their march and his eyes pulled along their route. His head turned involuntarily with the flow of the stream of Golems, each fraction of a radian arcing his focus of vision past more of the silent stone soldiers than he could count. Only when his neck reached the limit of its swiveling range did he find his concentration broken long enough to launch into a more deliberate analysis of the situation.

"There are two groups of them," he said aloud to himself and to Coppelia, if she cared to listen. "One army heading for the city, the other for the fortress. My guess is that the fortress has some sort of defense set up for it, but I cannot say how well-prepared the city is for an attack, especially an attack by a force of this size and this amazingly well-organized. I think we should join in the defense of..."

"Did you say there were two groups, Mister Chrono?" interrupted Coppelia. "By my count, there are three."

"Come again?"

Coppelia walked directly in front of Chrono, bowed politely in apology for breaking into Chrono's train of though, and continued, "There are two obvious directions in which the Golems are now marching, but there is a third, less obvious, group marching with one of the two. You can hear the distinct patterns of their feet hitting the ground at the same time, can you not?"

Chrono nodded. "It's as if they are all being controlled by the same mind!"

"Exactly," said Coppelia, "but we have more than one mind at work. Were there not some central organizing principle, there would be no reason for the mess of marching Golems to fall into step after leaving their hole in the ground, but why are there different marching patterns? Why are their steps perfectly periodic? Most importantly, why does the echo of the steps from the second group fall further and further behind the steps of the first?"

"I figured it had something to do with them marching into the distance, where it takes the sound longer to reach us. Lucca took great pains to make sure I understood that sound is not instantaneous, and that it has to travel, so..."

"I do not think they are far enough away for that to be an issue," said Coppelia. "What is more, I can check the timing visually. I am certain that the Golems are marching with evenly periodic steps, but there are three different period lengths. The group marching toward the city is doing so slightly more slowly than the other group, and thus each step they take is a tiny fraction of a second further removed from the step preceding it from the other formation. The group moving for the fortress, meanwhile, contains two different rhythms. Perhaps it takes extremely finely tuned hearing to notice this fact, but I assure you it is true, Mister Chrono."

Chrono paused for a moment, taking in all that Coppelia said and attempting to apply some of Lucca's lectures on basic physics to make sense of it and digging through his memory of old battles and adventures to find some relevant reference point. Somewhere before he had encountered similar armies, with a single mind controlling a horde of... robots, was it? Dealing with the horde meant dealing with the mind in control of it. When he decided he had a good grasp of the situation, he said, "Then there are three leaders of this army."

"Exactly," said Coppelia.

"One of which does not want to be seen."

"Please explain your reasoning, Mister Chrono."

"You said there were two distinct marching patterns in the group going for the fortress, right? That means there are two groups of Golems in that branch of the horde, and if you are right about each group being controlled by a single mind, then there are two minds there, while there is only one mind in control of the other group. Now, we can guess the objectives of two thirds of these Golems. One group wants to attack the city, and the other wants to attack the fortress in case the governing body of this province has fled to there by now. I have to wonder, then, why is there a third group? What is its objective?"

"I do not know."

"I want to find out, so I intend to follow that line," concluded Chrono.

"I have seen neither Miss Paem nor Sir Egmont," said Coppelia, "but I believe it is in our best interest to hurry on with them. From what Miss Paem said previously, I predict she will run to the city to meet with Lady Qilin. We do not have the luxury of following them so long as we do not know for what purpose an entire third of an army has amassed itself. My instinct tells me that following this trail is the quickest path to finding Miss Orchid."

"Yes, we... wait!" Chrono stopped himself. "You think that's who is in charge?"

"Miss Orchid allegedly has some role in this invasion, and she is clever enough to devise a stratagem involving disguising her forces amongst a larger crowd. I have seen no better indication of her mind at work than this."

"You really think we're going to find her, and your journey will reach its end?"

"I am cautiously optimistic."

Seizing upon this wording, Chrono took off at a jog down into the desert, shouting, "Optimism is just what we need now!"

Coppelia followed.

XXX

Neither Paem nor Egmont had any intention of following the waves of Golems to either the City of God's Hand or the Yellow River Fortress, at least at the moment. Their attentions were occupied entirely by the spectacle of the gaping hole in the desert out of which the Golems poured like water from a spigot. Egmont stood spellbound by the sight, hardly moving at all, whereas Paem had long since gone into a full-on panic. Her instincts pulled her in multiple directions at once, to protect the city, to look for Chrono and Coppelia, to try to contact Lady Qilin, and to wait and watch the source of the Golem army for some hint about what to do next. One minute, she found herself running in the direction of the city, and the next she found herself running back to where Egmont stood, watching the circus of Golems and waiting for the right opportunity for action to present itself.

Presumably the Lady Qilin would have heard the commotion outside and made for the safety of the fortress by now, Paem reasoned, but if the fortress was also under attack, what then? Could Chrono come to her aid? She had seen him running off in the direction of the fortress, but he was only one soldier. And what of Coppelia? Could Paem just let her go like that?

Running off on some fool's errand could just worsen the problem, however. As long as the Golems continued to storm out from beneath the ground, taking care of them, however many of them, would be a matter of treating a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself. But what could she do here? Egmont wasn't being any help, and it was unlikely that any of the city's defenders would have the time to follow the Golems back to their origin, would they?

Legs worn out from running, Paem found herself pacing rapidly back and forth, and then pacing more slowly, and then standing still and twitching, and then finally sitting on the sand, tightening and loosening her grip on her staff with the rhythm of the marching Golems. Between the umpteen directions in which her mind was torn, the unrelenting heat of the desert and the accursed sand that never stopped stinging her eyes, the worry that the conflict in the desert might spread to her own home, the soreness in her legs, the lack of anything she or her travel companions could do to stop the constant stream of invading monsters, and the never-ceasing thud, thud, thud of the feet of the horrid things trampling across the land—her land, or at least her allies' land—without a shred of compassion or pity in their faces, or even anger or revenge or patriotic fervor or anything else that normally motivated soldiers, without any emotion at all, just the incessant clumping of stone feet and dead-eyed stares into the distance, between all these things Paem felt as if she were going mad.

And then, after all the bizarre and unlikely and nearly incomprehensible things to happen that day, something else happened that further upset the delicate balance of Paem's psyche: something appeared beside the Golems.

At first she could hardly make out what it was—it was just a small, vaguely humanoid figure, a fraction of the size of any of the monstrous Golems. It rose out from the hole in the ground like a child's toy rocket, shooting a few dozen feet into the air and then landing, softly, over to the side, out of the way of the stone army. Only, it didn't land, at least not completely. It stopped and hovered just above the sand, and then it began to float forward, roughly in the direction of the flow of Golem traffic. As it came nearer, Paem could make out more and more details. It had a round white face, pale hair, bare white feet, a faintly bluish white robe or dress or some sort of indistinct article of clothing. Its shape was slightly feminine, but like that of a young girl rather than a fully-developed woman. Paem found that she could not distinguish any more details on the figure, as it gave off a bright white glow that, combined with the glare from the sun, made looking directly at it somewhat difficult. Moreover, the figure appeared fuzzy, as if its outline had been sketched several times over and no extraneous marks had been erased—it was an ill-defined figure.

Turning away for a second, Paem glanced over at Egmont. His relaxed posture had given way to that of an accomplished swordsman standing at ready, hand on the hilt of his blade, head cocked forward. Paem thought she detected a hint of nervousness in him, the like of which he had not even noticed during their fight with the giant shelled monster, but she easily could have been projecting her own fear onto him.

Then, as if to punctuate the sheer oddness of an what looked like a ghost girl appearing in the middle of the desert with an army of stone soldiers, the figure's blurry outline split into three, at first three overlapping little ghost girls, who separated themselves and then floated shoulder-to-shoulder forward, three shining dots of peculiarity. And from these three dots of ghostly light came music.

"Three little maids from school are we," they sang in union, "filled to the brim with girlish glee, pert as a schoolgirl well can be! Three little maids from school."

"Everything is a source of fun," sang the girl on the left.

"No one is safe, for we care for none," sang the girl on the right.

"Death is a joke that has just begun," sand the girl in the middle.

Then, altogether, "Three little maids from school."

Egmont drew his sword.

"Three little maids who, all unwary, come from a ladies' seminary, freed from its genius tutelary! Three little maids from school."

"One little maid is a bride, Yum-Yum..."

Paem, surprised that she turned out to be the one to keep her cool, watched in horror as Egmont snapped and charged the girls, shouting curses at them, flailing his sword about like a man possessed. Before she could stop him, he brought his sword down on the girl in the middle of the pack.


	26. Isolated Pawn

Chapter 25 – Isolated Pawn

Samsara's world shook. For a brief moment, whether out of grief for her friend or anger at Nimzovich or frustration at not knowing what to do, Samsara saw the world flicker like a candle, the walls or her laboratory buzzing out of shape and out of phase with the reality she knew. In place of the empty room, she saw an image, a numinous image, of a large, powerful man standing in front of a small, apparently helpless girl, bearing down on her with an enormous sword, directly over the spot of blood on the floor. As the weapon found its mark, Samsara watched, horrified, as the girl turned her head to face her. Samsara stared into the shocked eyes of the swordsman's victim, and Jinling's face stared back.

Then the whole scene faded, and all that remained was the laboratory, empty, and colder than the wall's thermometer made it out to be.

A small piece of Samsara's heart died that moment.

Completely stricken with feelings she had never needed before, she fell over onto her side, bumping her head against the hard floor, inadvertently switching her headset radio on, and the sounds of "Orest ist tot!" from Strauss's _Elektra_ spilled into the room, making Samsara feel even more hollow.

Numbness overtaking anger, Samsara sat and thought no thoughts, felt no feelings, and said no words. Absentmindedly, she struck her hammer against the floor a few more times, each halfheartedly, half hoping she could work up the motivation to act, or at least to think, to do anything to lessen the pain, to make things better, to make things right again. But there was nothing to do but pound on the floor with a hammer. Were Nimzovich there, she could pound on him with her hammer.

This thought dragged the smallest bit of feeling back to her. It was an uncomfortable feeling, an anger that drew upon reserves of violence she considered too primal and uncivilized to touch, but it persisted, manifesting in her knocking on the floor. With a thud, thud, thud, she hit over and over, lightly at first, and just barely rhythmically, but the more she hit, the clearer the image, however contrived, of Nimzovich she had in her mind, and the harder she struck at it. The blows of her hammer grew more and more mechanical as she went, each strike feeding back into her anger, and her anger feeding the falling of the hammer, intensity spiraling upwards, tempo increasing, until a red mist covered her eyes and she nearly lost control.

Louder and louder, harder and harder, Samsara struck the floor again and again. Pausing only to remove her glasses and wipe the mist from her eyes with her hands, she found that everything became even redder the harder she rubbed, so she dropped all pretense of self-control and flung her hammer madly at the ground. Unable to see it to pick it up, she began hitting with closed fists instead of her hammer, again and again and again, until she could no longer feel anything with either hand. Her feet and her body grew numb, and then her heart, and then she felt dizzy, and she collapsed again, bloody red stains lining her face and staining her knuckles, palms, and the floor below her.

The red world faded to black, and Samsara fell asleep.

XXX

Samsara looked up from where she stood and saw a wooden sign hanging down from a metal gate. The sign was old and half rotted away, but the gate appeared fresh and shiny, as if it had been polished recently. Carved into the sign were letters she could barely read, spelling out some sort of koan that made no sense to her: "Truth becomes fiction where the fiction's true, and real becomes not-real where the unreal's real." After the second time she read through the sign's quizzical words, it fell to the ground with a splash and disappeared beneath the earth. She did not wonder either why it fell or why it disappeared.

Lacking anything else to do, Samsara walked through the gate that once held the sign, taking care to float above the water into which the sign had fallen, or to walk around it. By the time she had crossed, she could not remember how she did it, so she looked back to find some clue. When she looked back, the gate had disappeared, and in its place was a lush green garden filled with orchids and tulips and ornamented with statues carved out of jade and lined with gold.

Samsara shook her head and turned forward again, for the first time noticing that in front of her was a deep ravine carved out of red rock, with a fast-flowing river jetting by underneath. Without even realizing she was doing so, she found herself walking forward, toward the ravine. She tried to shout and warn herself that there was no bridge, but she had no voice. When she reached the edge, she closed her eyes and took a step, and her foot hit upon a solid, if creaky, wooden slate, part of a bridge that was not there before she closed her eyes.

Relieved, Samsara made her way to the center of the bridge, where she came upon a fairy, floating half a dozen feet above her and looking sternly down on her with a face that she recognized as her mother's. The fairy said nothing but shook her head and shrugged her shoulders; she then flew to the far end of the bridge and becked for Samsara to follow her.

She followed, but when she was three quarters of the way across, one of her feet hit a hole where one of the wooden slates was missing, and she tumbled down, at the last second catching hold of the side with her hand. With a grunt she pulled herself up until her shoulders were above the level of the bridge, but then the bridge became slippery, and she nearly fell again. Below her, she saw the river turn to fire, bubbles of which leaped up from the depths and threatened to scorch her feet.

From the solid ground at the end of the bridge, the fairy pointed and growled at her, impatient for her to make her way across. Samsara tried to shout that she needed help getting back up, but again her voice was gone, so she was forced to ignore the fairy and concentrate on trying to pull herself up.

She looked down at the river of fire again, and when she looked up, the fairy was gone. In the fairy's place were the wavy outlines of three ghosts, in the shapes of young girls, walking side by side across the bridge until they reached Samsara. As they walked, they hummed a tune Samsara vaguely recognized as being from the ballet _Giselle_. Unable to call out to the ghosts, and unable to move her arms to signal that she needed help, Samsara struggled to make the most helpless face she could in hopes of gaining their sympathy.

One of the ghost girls, the one in the middle, pointed at her face and laughed, long and hard. The other two looked over at the one in the middle and then at Samsara and then at the ghost in the middle, and then they too joined in the laughter. Samsara suddenly felt the urge to laugh along with them, and when she did, she found that her voice had returned, only it was someone else's voice—Jinling's! Together, the three ghost girls and Jinling's voice laughed and cackled and carried on for as long a time as can be counted in a dream, and as they all laughed, the ghost girl in the middle began to spin around and around in a circle until her body was a blur. She laughed as she spun, and she laughed as she slowed to a stop, facing away from Samsara.

Suddenly Samsara's voice disappeared again, and with it went her breath, as if all the air in the world had been sucked out instantaneously. Samsara felt her face turn blue and then purple and then orange and then green as she tried to clutch her throat with her third arm while her first two held fast to the bridge. When she realized she did not have a third arm, she couched one more time, and whatever had kept her from breathing fell out of her throat and onto the wood slate in front of her. At first it was just a small trinket, and she could not tell what it was, but soon it became apparent that it was her hammer.

The ghost girls laughed again, both the ones facing her and the one facing away. As they laughed, the all began to sound like Jinling, and when the middle ghost turned around to face her, it _looked_ like Jinling. Samsara nearly choked again.

The laugher continued from the ghost girls until the one in the middle, the one with Jinling's face and now voice, picked up Samsara's hammer and thrust it downward into the wooden slate with a monstrous thud, thud, thud. The other two ghosts girls seemed to find this amusing, so they laughed louder and the Jinling ghost hit harder and harder with the hammer, slowly splintering the block of wood, slowly shaking the flimsy bridge, slowly willing Samsara to fall to her doom down below in the river of fire.

Thud, thud, thud, went the hammer, and thud, thud, thud went Samsara's heart.

XXX

_Thud, thud, thud_ came the sound at the front door to the lab as Samsara awoke from her slumber, blood racing and head spinning and hands and feet tingly and numb. Thinking as quickly as she could, she lashed out with her arm to hit the snooze button on her alarm clock and win herself nine more minutes of sleep, but she could not find any alarm clock or even any bed. Groggily opening her eyes and lilting her head from side to side as she regained her bearings, Samsara remembered where she was and why she was there, on the floor, in such a sad state.

The knocking at the door continued, louder and louder, more and more frantic. Samsara had not yet decided she would open the door, but before she even had that as an option, she had to get to her feet and get in some position to open doors or run or hide or whatever final option she might settle on. For now, though, she found just getting to her feet to be difficult enough. She tried supporting herself with her hands the way she normally rose from the floor, but both hands were bruised and bloody enough that they buckled under when she put even the smallest load on them; she saw for the first time just how much of her blood littered the floor while she examined her hands, and the cautious voice in her head told her to be careful lest she had a broken bone or two.

Weary of lying on the floor and listening to some unknown person or group of people attempting to knock down her door, she twisted and turned until she was able to swing her weight onto her knees, and from there she pulled herself up into a squatting position and then to her feet. She started off for the door, but then she scolded herself for being rash and bent down to try to pick up her hammer first. While her fingers still hardly worked, she managed to trap it between her two palms and pulled it up under her right arm, where she held it fast until she managed to open her satchel wide enough to drop it in. From there, she looked around the room once more.

She saw nothing encouraging. The front door, though solid, continued to shake under an increasingly violent storm of knocking. The lab had an emergency exit, but she did not know if it would be best to run that way or to find out who was out in front. It could have been Nimzovich, of course, but on the other hand, it could have been the police investigating Jinling's disappearance.

How would the police know about her, though? Samsara let out a breath that was somewhere between a huff and a sigh, and she walked up to the door and stopped in front of it. Aware that she was vulnerable and not in a particularly good state for running away from anyone, she though again about taking the back exit and letting whoever was in front worry about the front door. However, she also thought about how bad the situation would be if the front door were to be broken somehow, and how she valued the security her laboratory provided her.

What security, though, if Jinling could be here, and still...?

A dagger of pain shot up through Samsara's chest. She clearly was not ready to think about that yet. For the moment, all she could focus on was the door. All she could _afford_ to focus on was the door.

_Thud, thud, thud_, reminded the door.

She turned the options available to her over in her mind, again and again. Maybe the police were at the door, and they would help her out. Maybe Nimzovich was behind the door, and he would kill her. Maybe it was Jinling...

But it couldn't be Jinling, could it? And if it was Nimzovich, maybe he wouldn't be the one to kill her. Maybe...

Ignoring the pain in her hands, ignoring the pins and needles that pierced her whole arms as she willed her muscles to obey her, Samsara tore the hammer out of her satchel and, without further thought, ran to the door, pulled it open, and lifted her hammer above her head. She tried to shout something threatening, but all that came out was a shrill cry that might have come off as terror or confusion or anything in between to a listener. All she could see in her mind was the image of an evil man standing over her friend's body, her hammer smashing the man's head and causing him to crumple to the ground next to Jinling. As the door opened, Samsara let the hammer fall.

This proved to be a bad idea.

Before it was even halfway over her head, the bolt from a police-grade electric stun pistol ripped into her torso and deadened her joints. Her arms fell to her sides, her hammer landed harmlessly on the floor, and her knees gave out. Without further struggle, she fell to the floor, unarmed and helpless before what turned out to be a crowd of large men in silver uniforms and shielded helmets.

"Suspect is down," said the man in front into a small radio. "We are inside, and we have our suspect. I repeat, we have our suspect. Backup not needed."

A "roger" and some other jargon filtered through the static on the man's radio, but Samsara could not interpret any of it.

Some of the other large men crowded around. One of them, wearing a slightly darker uniform with a red badge pinned to his chest, took the liberty of grabbing Samsara by the collar and pulling her more or less to her feet. His badge reached her eye level when he had her at full height, though Samsara was too woozy to say what shapes or letters or numbers might have been on the badge. She could barely even hear his voice as he shouted some orders to his subordinates and the slapped restraints onto her wrists.

"You are under arrest for the murder of Miss Jinling Lan," he said to her, and that was all she could catch before she blacked out again.


	27. Begins and Ends With Nu

Chapter 26 – Begins and Ends With Nu

_One little maid, once called a lover__  
Two little maids who gave her cover__  
Now the one has dirt above her__  
Three little maids from school__  
Three little maids, take one away  
__Two little maids remain and they__  
Won't have to wait very long, they say  
Three little maids from school  
Three little maids, all torn to pieces  
Fed to the foxes, tossed to the breezes  
Seeking our revenge on all who sees us  
Three little maids from school_

An unearthly screech ripped through the air as Egmont's sword fell through the girl standing in front of him. It was not a cry like that of a voice; rather, it sounded more similar to a sheet of metal being rent asunder, almost as if the girl herself were made of aluminum, though without the resistance a metallic girl would provide to a sword slicing her in half. Egmont brought his sword through her torso and out the side of her leg and then pulled back.

For roughly a second, the girl appeared to have been split in two. Then her two halves pressed themselves together, and the fissure separating them vanished, leaving no trace of the attack save a frowning expression on the face that had been gaily singing before Egmont's attack. Her eyes flashed with anger. She raised her arms in front of her until they were parallel to the ground, and she clenched her fists.

Instinctively, Egmont brought his arm up into a defensive posture, and not a moment too soon. A burst of red lightning bolts shot from the girl's hands and struck Egmont's shield, and at the point of impact, the air exploded, making a sound like thunder and pushing Egmont back onto the sand. He lay there but a second before resuming his assault, sword flailing wildly back and forth, each blow eliciting the same sound of scraping metal followed by the target fixing herself and launching a counterattack.

Paem stood back, utterly in shock at Egmont's ferocity. She readied herself in case one of the other girls attempted aid the one with whom Egmont was sparring, but neither did. The only instance of battle within sight was that in front of her between Egmont the Knight of Kalinovo and a ghost girl who refused to be killed. Try as she might, she could think of no appropriate response to the scene.

Eventually it was Egmont who broke the pattern of attacks and counterattacks between the two parties. Previously he had used mostly wide, powerful arcing swings of his sword, the sort of blows he might use if his opponent were on horseback. After making little progress with that style of fighting, he substituted a swifter thrust toward the torso of the girl, but at the last instant he pulled back in a feint. Paem recognized that he missed her because she did not hear a scraping sound as Egmont finished his motion. The girl readied her counterattack anyway, raising her fists to charge her lightning, but with Egmont's sword closer and under better control than it had been after the longer sweeping strikes, she never had a chance to pull it off. Instead of putting up his shield, Egmont stepped to one side and pulled his sword into an uppercut slice directly through the ghost girl's left wrist.

This time, instead of a screech, Egmont's strike met with a bang, a flash of red, and a fireball that threw both combatants ten feet in opposite directions. Egmont's sword spun over his head before landing with its point down in the sand.

Paem almost ran to where Egmont had landed, but not knowing the status of the girl, she checked herself and scanned the other side of the battlefield for signs of life. She found more than she expected.

Egmont's attack had done its job; the ghost girl's left hand was gone. Clutching the stump on her wrist, she writhed about and cried with a voice like that of a cat. Her voice grew louder and louder until it finally broke, but when it did so, she summoned an even larger ball of fire and flung it at Egmont. He only narrowly dodged.

What worried Paem more than the ghost girl, though, was the marching pattern of the Golems. The majority of them continued to press forward, but nearly a third of them broke formation and began stomping back and forth haphazardly, their pace quickening. A few charged off from the main line into the distance, like seeds flecking off from a dandelion and blowing away. Others collided with each other and with the Golems still marching, knocking many of them onto their backs, from which position they appeared unable to stand again. Through all of this, Golems continued to pour out into the desert, and the thicker the crowd, the more disorganized the lot became. If the behavior of the pack had been like a liquid flowing down a pipe before, the addition of the disorganized division within acted as a clot, slowing the traffic and increasing the density near the origin.

Eventually, the density became too great, and the ground began to give way. The hole where the large monster sank after Chrono killed it expanded, creeping over the Golems' path and swallowing them as it went. Marching, nonmarching, and fallen Golems all disappeared underground. The lip of the growing crater, fast becoming a trench rather than a mere hole, became engulfed in a tower of dust; it looked like a whirlwind moving along the path and eating everything in its way.

Paem shouted at Egmont to follow her, and then she ran as fast as she could. The flow of the Golems cut her off from the City of God's Hand, so she ran in the direction of the Yellow River Fortress.

Risking a glance behind her, she saw no one following. Egmont had resumed his battle with the ghost girl.

Paem shouted again, but her voice disappeared into the roar of the collapsing earth, the wild Golems, and even the odd metal scraping sound or exploding fireball from the skirmish still happening behind her. She dared not go back. The cloud drew closer and closer to the ghost girls, and she wanted as much distance between her and the mass destruction as she could manage.

As a last ditch attempt to catch Egmont's attention, Paem cast a shadow spell on the sand in front of Egmont, but he did not appear to notice it. His full attention rested with his nemesis.

The flash of his steel and the glow of the girl's magic persisted right up to the end. Paem felt a slight lump in her throat when she saw Egmont strike his final blow. Then the cloud swallowed him, the girl with whom he had fought, and both of her companions, and then it moved on.

Paem felt nothing, not even the overbearing sun or the sting of the sand on her face, as she turned her head and sprinted full tilt away from the scene.

XXX

Coppelia stopped running and pointed at the ranks of Golems.

"Mister Chrono, they have ceased their marching. Whatever had been controlling their movements has stopped."

Chrono pulled up beside Coppelia and sized up the Golem army. Whereas before a few of the Golems had broken off from the main group and stumbled around the open desert, now nearly all of them seemed to be directionless. The rough shape of the column remained, stretching ahead into the distance, but its structure degraded as attrition cost it almost all of its constituent Golems. Those that did not collide and fall to the ground eventually escaped from the pack and lumbered off in no direction in particular, and with the general forward march no longer in effect, the Golems who wandered off were not replaced by new arrivals. Thus, the vein of Golems grew thinner.

"Does this mean..." Chrono began, but Coppelia cut him off.

"This means we must hurry. If Miss Orchid is in control of these creatures, she may be in danger. It is in our best interest to reach the final destination of the third company of Golems as soon as we can. We can still follow the track of the fallen Golems."

Chrono nodded understandingly.

"Mister Chrono, I believe it is also in our best interest to reach more solid ground. I hear a catastrophe behind us, and I can see a cloud of dust moving ever closer. If we do not make haste, we may not survive to accomplish our mission."

Chrono realized he had remained rooted to the sight of the mass of disorganized Golems, and he only broke free when Coppelia shook him back to reality. Indeed, he could see the cloud in the distance, and he could hear a faint but growing rumbling sound accompanying it. His survival instinct screamed at him to dash away from the ominous cloud, but something held him back. A thought.

"Paem and Egmont are back there!" he insisted. "What can we do?"

Coppelia frowned. "Our priority is to reach safety and find Miss Orchid. We must proceed."

"We can't just leave them!"

"Is there anything we could do if we did go back?"

Chrono's feet carried themselves a few paces in the direction of the cloud. "There is always something we can do! Even if we risk our lives, we can help them. That's always what happens!"

"Are you certain that-"

Something cut Coppelia off in mid-sentence. In fact, something cut everything off. All at once, the world around Chrono froze. Coppelia's voice, the stamping of Golem feet, the crashing of rocks, and even the wind fell silent. Chrono put his hands to his ears to see if something had happened to them, but he seemed fine. At least he could hear himself think. He tried snapping his fingers to make sure he could still hear; it turned out he could.

He then heard something else: "Chrono!"

It was the voice of the Fairy Disenchantment.

"Chrono! Do not delay. Follow Coppelia. There is nothing else you can do but to follow her."

Chrono felt a slight surge of anger welling up. "How do you know?"

"Just run, Chrono! Run or be swallowed by the earth! Run or be eaten!"

Before the words could sink in, time snapped back to normal for Chrono. The sudden jolt of noise after the relative quiet shook him to the point where he lost his balance, but he recovered before he could fall. Coppelia tugged at his wrist, and he nearly fell again, but she caught him with her spare arm.

"Mister Chrono, please hurry. I can fully sympathize with your desire to help your comrades, but if we do not hurry, we might all die. This is our only chance."

Chrono shook his arm free and started in the opposite direction. "Without the others, we don't even know where we are. We'll be lost in the middle of nowhere again."

"You do not wish to see friends harmed. Yet, you are my friend, and I do not wish to see you harmed. Can you appreciate my dilemma?"

"Just a bit longer!" Chrono pleaded. "I need to know that they are okay. I need to... wait, look! Is that...?"

Coppelia stepped in front of Chrono. "I will save Miss Paem. Please run to the Yellow River Fortress."

Chrono sighed, took a deep breath, and ran.

XXX

The Yellow River Fortress sat on the north side of a canyon, at the bottom of which ran the Yellow River. Its walls made of a solid mixture of limestone, clay, and brick, it had stood its position for countless centuries, an oasis of stability and a beacon of life and comfort in the harsh and desolate land. Sand piled against the northern wall up about a third of the way; anything beyond that had been been removed to preserve the tactical advantage of having high walls to deter an invasion force. Most of the fortress's windows were small and covered with thick glass to keep stray sand particles at bay. A sort of drainage ditch for sand had been dug around the northern gate to flush excess sand away in order to keep it from interfering with the normal opening and closing of the gate. Visible in a few places were reinforced iron and copper pipes for pumping water up from the river below into the fortress. Within the walls were some patches of soil for farming.

Running behind the fortress was a bridge over the canyon, beyond which lay the so-called badlands, a seemingly endless stretch of sand and rock completely uninterrupted by signs of civilization. In the middle of the bridge stood a tower that could have been the twin of the northern Himmelkreuz tower near Lord Kuei's domain.

And everywhere around the grounds, inside the fortress and out, around in front, on the bridge, and stretching to the east and west along the edge of the canyon, there were Golems. The majority of them no longer moved, as most of those that could move had long since fallen over the edge and into the Yellow River far below. Those that remained either wriggled mindlessly on the ground or lay still, and those that lay still often showed signs of injury from magical burns or arrow wounds or spear punctures. Golems were by no means the only sign that life had been there recently; human corpses littered the grounds as well, though their numbers were far smaller than those of the Golem army. Their injuries were also far more gruesome. The saturation of dead flesh made the area reek like no place Chrono had ever visited before.

Just inside the cracked and battered front gate of the fortress, Chrono, Coppelia, and Paem gathered around a small mound of dirt in one of the patches of soil. Atop the mound they had placed a rock into which Chrono had carved Egmont's name and a short epitaph. Behind the rock he had stuck into the dirt a sword looted from the fortress, acting in place of Egmont's, which he had taken with him in his fight with the ghost. None of the three felt it would be right to go on without honoring the memory of their fallen knight, but Chrono had been the most insistent that he be given a warrior's proper burial, even if they had no body to bury. Paem had informed them, to their great relief, that they had time for the funeral, as the cloud in the distance had been caused by the collapse of the unstable crust of the land, but the ground near the canyon was solid, and thus the cloud could not reach them anymore.

The short vigil in memory of Egmont was attended by Chrono, Coppelia, Paem, and two Nus who had taken up residence in the fortress and who had been hiding in a supply shelter during the attack. As it turned out, several Nus lived in the area, though most of them took little interest in Chrono's party. Their presence set Chrono a bit on edge, as he had always felt somewhat ill at ease around Nus, but he did his best to ignore them at first.

After the vigil, however, ignoring the Nus became much more difficult. Whereas the party had only seen a few when they first arrived and a few more when they looked around for stores of food and water, their number grew, and the new arrivals came mostly from outside the grounds. First dozens and then hundreds of them plodded slowly but steadily across the dunes to the fortress and the outlying areas.

Within minutes, the almost hauntedly empty hallways of Yellow River Fortress filled with the round, blue, spongy bodies and noodle-like appendages of the Nus. At least one moved into every room in the fortress, and most rooms found themselves stocked with six or more. The open area outside the main structure but inside the outer wall became stuffed with them. Nus surrounded the wall, Nus covered the top of the wall, and Nus piled into the drainage ditch below. Neither nook nor cranny of sufficient size to house a Nu found itself unoccupied.

Something in Chrono's instinct to protect those to whom he owed loyalty caused him to stand near Egmont's grave. Coppelia stood with him, though Paem preferred to be off by herself. Chrono could not tell if she wanted to be alone out of grief over their friend or out of interest in the spectacle of hundreds upon hundreds of Nus piling into the fortress grounds, but he did not wish to press the issue. Instead, he and Coppelia watched as the Nus gathered silently around and stood as if waiting for some signal.

In contrast with the Golems, the Nus appeared each to be acting of its own volition. With the exception of a few groups of six, which Chrono recognized as hunting packs (he seemed to remember Lucca saying), there seemed to be no organized movement among any of them. The general trend was for each to find a spot in which to stand somewhere in or around the area, but several could be seen trading spots, pacing, or wandering aimlessly. Even the hunting packs showed only loose organization. Their overall effect was like that of a flock of perching birds, unreadable yet sinister.

Someone tapped Chrono on the shoulder; it was Paem. She had moved stealthily behind him. Her face wore an expression of deep concern, and she could not stop fidgeting with her staff and shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She seemed to be breathing heavily.

Leaning in, she whispered in Chrono's ear: "We need to leave. Fast."

Chrono raised his eyebrows in puzzlement. He had been enjoying watching the Nu gathering.

"Hurry," said Paem. "That tower in the middle of the bridge is another access point for Himmelkreuz. We'll be safe there, but we have to go. Now."

"What is the problem?" Chrono whispered back.

"The Nus," said Paem. "I've figured out what is going on. They've gathered to feed."


	28. Intermission I

Chapter 27 – Intermission I

"Hi! I'm Princess Nadia. You may know me better as Marle, one of the heroes who travelled with Chrono on his first adventure. We fought a planetary scale parasite named Lavos and saved the future, and we also did a lot of miscellaneous rescuing in the past. I'm here today at readers' request to help those of you who are new to the story to catch up on things without having to review sixty thousand words of excitement, adventure, mystery, intrigue, and uneven pacing. I haven't done anything in the story since the first chapter, so I'm happy to take any role I can get.

"Shall we start from the beginning? Do you remember how everything began? The very first chapter was supposed to be this story's 'happily ever after' event. It was a wedding! Chrono and I were about to get hitched, but he vanished. Right in front of me and Lucca and everyone else, he disappeared into a hole in the space-time continuum! Sort of like I did all those years ago, actually, but this time it wasn't Lucca's fault.

"Chrono ended up in some place Beyond Time. I've heard Lucca talk about someplace like that before, but I never knew anyone who ever traveled there before. Who would want to? Time is meaningless there, or so I'm told, and it seems to be where a lot of dead people turn up. Is it the afterlife? Of course Chrono is not dead. You can't just kill off the hero in the first chapter, can you? Not here. No, Chrono ended up alive but out of place. He would have been all by himself, too, if he hadn't run into a suspicious fairy called Disenchantment. What an odd name! Fitting, though. She was an odd one, saying she was to take him to see some Princess of the Dead. As if he needed another princess!

"Chrono, not knowing what else to do, followed Disenchantment into a suspicious set of caves called Jinling Caverns. What a funny name! It sounds familiar somehow. It turned out to be a pretty dangerous place, too; Chrono and Disenchantment got lost for a while. A couple of interesting things happened while they were lost: Disenchantment gave Chrono a magical ball of light for getting through dark caves, and a couple of monsters called Passion and Pain attacked, and after that Chrono found himself alone.

"The situation changed again when he ran into another traveler lost in the maze. She was a curious young woman named Coppelia. Claiming she was looking for someone named Orchid, she decided to tag along with Chrono in hopes of making it easier for the both of them to accomplish their goals. This turned out to be fortuitous, as they needed each other's help to get past a monster guarding the exit to the caves.

"Once outside, a resident of the Darkness Beyond Time welcomed Chrono to the land and gave him a new sword with which to protect himself. The sword even doubled as an informational pamphlet! Its magical hilt occasionally would display cryptic poetry having something to do with wherever Chrono traveled. Isn't that interesting? It certainly explains the poetry all over the place. I sort of wish it would go away, as I see altogether too much uninteresting poetry during my management of the kingdom.

"Oh, did I not tell you? I'm going to be the Queen soon. Queen Nadia. Does that have a good ring to it? Father says I need to be bit more dignified for my public appearances, but he mistakes "old-fashioned" and "dignified" all the time. That's not really important for the story about the moment, but I'm sure it will eventually. I can't go through this entire story without doing anything, can I?

"I might want to mention that the magic sword told Chrono an interesting story about how the King of the Dead lost his vassals when a star split the heavens, so he appointed four new generals in their place. These were not enough to protect against monsters from the part of the sky separated by the fallen star, so he organized a contest between a Rat, an Ox, a Tiger, a Rabbit, a Dragon, a Snake, a Horse, a Goat, a Monkey, a Phoenix, a Dog, a Pig, and a Cat. The contest would determine which one would serve which general. During the contest, the animals had to cross the Sea of Sadness, and each did so in a different way. The Rat and Cat rode on the Ox, but at one point the Rat became frightened and pushed the Cat into the water, where he disappeared. The Rat won the race, and the Cat was never seen again. I don't think Chrono knows this, but a form of this legend exists among the royal family at Guardia, though the tale is old enough that no one seems to know what it means. You can read it again for yourself in Chapter 10, if you wish.

"In any case, Chrono and his new companion Coppelia made their way through a forest and out into a dark, bleak, rocky field next to a town. In that town, they met a new friend, a fortune teller named Paem, who surprised everyone by possessing a large Dreamstone. Do you remember Dreamstone from my previous adventure? It's the stuff the Masamune and Schala's pendant were made of. Oh, and don't forget its connection to Lavos! Why does everything always go back to Lavos? I suppose we should bear that in mind as we look to the future of Chrono's new quest.

"Anyhow, Paem told our heroes that she could see the future using power from a goddess, whom she named Sophia. Coppelia suggested that this 'goddess' was probably a giant computer, like the computers I saw in the year 2300. Lucca knows more about them than I do, but they seem pretty powerful, so I would not be surprised if Coppelia was right. I don't know what Chrono thinks; he must have only vague idea of what a computer is, since he comes from a time when there aren't any! Does this tell us anything about Coppelia? I think it means she is definitely not from my time.

"Paem mentioned that she needs a connection point to take full advantage of her ability to predict the future, so she offered to take Chrono and Coppelia to a tower called Himmelkreuz. I think that means something about 'Heaven' and a 'cross' or something. I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think it's important. More important is that, while looking around inside the tower, some villainous people attacked the town! Chrono and his friends easily dispatched Plum Blossom the Assassin and Yu the Fisherman, two creepy and violent people from someplace at war with Paem's land. More sinister than those two was a loathsome man in a mask and cloak who claimed to be a murderer. He was strong. He was even a match for our heroes, but Chrono took advantage of a misstep and sent him down into a river. I hope that is the last of him. He gives me a really sick feeling in my stomach whenever he is around.

"On the bright side, Coppelia drew some information from Plum Blossom during the battle. Apparently, her Orchid, the woman she was looking for, was due out in the western province soon—at the head of an invasion force! Isn't that a little too dramatic? At least it was a clue. Chrono and company went back to town to see Paem's boss, Lord Kuei, to discuss what to do about the news, as well as what to do about the attack. There, they met two of Paem's friends, Mal and Sajo, who were among the highest ranking officials in the land, just like Paem. Lord Kuei ordered Paem to accompany Chrono and Coppelia as they headed west to look for Orchid.

"The western province turned out to be a huge desert. Chrono soon learned that it was much more dangerous than the previous area. He hadn't been there long before he had to take shelter in a small cave to get away from the sandstorms. While in the cave, he met some creatures that closely resembled the Yakra, which, if you remember, was the thing that disguised itself as Guardia's chancellor in the year 600 and in the present in order to try to take over the kingdom. The one in the past even kidnapped Queen Leene! Nasty creatures, Yakras. These particular Yakra beasts even managed to capture a brave knight from the distant past, sent to the Darkness Beyond Time to avenge the murdered king of his homeland of Kalinovo. Such a tragic story! I remember it from my history lessons. I don't remember the king's name, but I remember that the knight Chrono met was called Egmont. He told his story, and he agreed to help Chrono's party out in the desert. He left out the part of his story I remember best, though. There was more to the events of Kalinovo than just a murdered king. Why would he not mention the love story between the prince and that girl? The Royal Guardian Theater Company performs that part on stage every year. It's one of our most popular plays. I'll have to tell you the story some other time. Look for it a few chapters down the road! I'd tell you now, but I need to fetch a copy of the script so I don't mix up the details.

"Wanna know a secret? The storybooks and the plays leave something even more interesting out of the story. The Tragedy of Kalinovo happened around something lost to time, something amazing, remembered in legends passed down among the royal family. The murder of the king and the romance of the prince happened around the discovery of an ancient treasure from the lost Kingdom of Zeal. I bet you didn't know that already. See, I do get to add something to this story! Unfortunately, I can't remember what the treasure was, but I'll get back to you on that.

"Travel in the desert got even nastier fairly quickly. First, Chrono had to fight a giant shelled monster that rose out of the sand. After he killed it, a horde of Golems spilled out of the underground and ran amok all over the desert, but Coppelia thought they were strangely organized. In fact, there were actually three groups of Golems, one marching to the capital city, one going to the desert fortress near the western Himmelkreuz tower, and one with mysterious orders that we never learned. Chrono and Coppelia ran after the third group, but before they found where they were going to, Egmont and Paem encountered three little ghost girls. Egmont went nuts and tried to kill one of them, but he couldn't. However, it turned out that the girls were directing the Golems, so when Egmont distracted them, they Golems went out of control, and their combined weight was too much for the desert floor. See, the desert was really just a bunch of sand sitting on top of a shell, under which everything was hollow. I don't know what was under there, but whatever it was, it was probably crushed when the desert collapsed under the weight of the Golems.

"I am sad to say that Egmont was lost in the collapse, along with the ghost girls. Paem escaped and joined Chrono at the desert fortress, which had been abandoned in the crisis. They rested for a while and mourned for their friend, but then the strangest thing of all happened. Remember those odd little round blue things Chrono and I saw all over time when we were trying to stop Lavos? Nu, I think they were called. These little guys swarmed the castle. You know how that man Crow gives me a sick feeling? I mention that earlier. Well, the Nus give me a funny feeling, too, but it's not the same feeling. It's sort of like they're not really from this world, or maybe they're _from_ this world, but not in the same way we are. I can't really explain it.

"Anyway, Paem became worried that the Nus were gathered to feed. Not wanting to be eaten, our heroes ran for it, and that's' where we stand right now. Pretty exciting, huh? Danger everywhere, mysteries to unravel, epic tales of romance murder lying just beneath the surface... If this were what my history lessons were like, I would have paid more attention! Poor Chrono, caught in the middle of it all! Will I ever get to see him again?

"That's half of the story. Something else is brewing along with that tale, and it seems to me that it's pretty important, too. Do you mind if I catch you up on the story of Samsara Ashtear? It's important, and you'll want to make sure you know what is going on before the next series of events happens.

"Here it goes. Samsara, called Sam by her friends, is the daughter of scientist, inventor, and A.D. 1000 troublemaker Lucca Ashtear, my best friend. The story hasn't yet mention much surrounding the circumstances of Samsara's birth or even who her father is, but I'm sure you'll find out eventually. For now, it's enough to know who she is. Also, when. She lives in the distant future, in a time after the defeat of Lavos. Lives? Lived? I hate dealing with verb tenses and time travel. I know I should pick a case and stick with it, but I might get a little mixed up. I'll have to quit the mix-ups when I become Queen, of course, but for now I order you to forgive me. Tee hee. I can't actually order you until I become Queen, can I?

"In the future, Balthasar, one of the Three Gurus of Zeal founds his own city and his own university, where he teaches and does his research into the nature of time. Lucca has decided to work with him for a while, and together they transform our understanding of physics, mathematics, and nature. This is wonderful for all involved, though neither of the two is able to piece together all of the mysteries. Rumors circulate involving some unfinished projects Balthasar has sitting around. So strange, people talking about the guy as if he's already dead! So strange that he managed to live so long, too, huh? Lives so long, lived so long, whatever. I don't know which case I should be using.

"Eventually, Lucca has her baby, Samsara, and she leaves her to study to follow in her footsteps. Samsara befriends Jinling Lan, a country girl who managed to get into the prestigious Balthasar University. Both are incredibly talented, and both finish their degrees and go on to work for the university as researchers. As best friends, they also share an apartment and a rented laboratory for work. Samsara has her hands in several projects, including some dealings in artificial intelligence and robotics, but her main focus is on temporal mathematics. Jinling's focus is more narrow. She cares only about her pet project, a timeship she and Samsara are building.

"So far, it seems there is no room for anything suspicious in their lives, but word of their success, and their favor with Balthasar (Why not Lucca? What happened to her? More on that later.), spread among students at the university. Eventually, a computer science student named Nimzovich begins electronic mail correspondence (note: these are words I learned from Lucca, so I may not be using them correctly) with Samsara. They play a game of long-distance chess, and at the same time, Nimzovich begs Samsara to know more about her timeship project.

"Jinling gets curious about Samsara's secret letters, so she starts spying on her. One weekend, when Samsara is out of town, she sees a message saying that Nimzovich is coming to visit, and she guesses that his intentions are bad. She manages to lock down the apartment, but she reasons that he will probably attempt to sneak into the lab to steal the timeship. She gets there before he does, but he manages to surprise her.

"When Samsara returns, she finds signs that something is amiss, and so she visits the lab to make sure her project and her friend are safe. When she arrives, she finds that the timeship is missing, and so is Jinling. Worse, she sees evidence of a violent struggle in the form of a pool of dried blood on the ground.

"The city is already in chaos, as the mayor chooses that day to announce his resignation under corruption charges, and there are a few scary rumors going around about the new acting mayor. Samsara hears of this, but she has no time to think about what it means at first.

"Right now, she has other things on her mind, as the most important things in her life has just vanished. To make matters worse, the police then come to the door of the lab and arrest her. The charge is for the murder of her best friend, Jinling Lan.

"Does it get any worse for Samsara? Will she figure out what is going on? How is this connected to Chrono's story? Find out in future chapters. Actually, her story continues in the next chapter, so I hope you are looking forward to it.

"I also hope you enjoyed our time together. I'm a little angry that this is only the second chapter I've been in, so you can count on me to pop in from time to time to keep you informed. As little as I've appeared so far, this is my story, too, even if I have to fight for it. I mean, Chrono _disappeared_ in the middle of our wedding! Do you think I'm going to sit around and do nothing after something like that? No way! That's a story for another time, though. You'll find out what I mean, but not right away. For now, enjoy reading about Samsara in the next chapter and Chrono in the chapter after that.

"Yes, I'm fairly certain Chrono is not going to be eaten by Nus less than halfway through his story, but something interesting is bound to happen soon.

"Until next time, please remember your favorite princess! Ciao, folks."


	29. Zwischenzug

Chapter 28 – Zwischenzug

Something sharp and prickly dug into Samsara's back; she could feel it through her shirt, but at the moment she did not have the energy to brush it off. She could not even tell if it was underneath her or above her, whether she was on her back or her stomach or her side or her feet or her head, or whether she was awake or it was day or night or whether she was hungry or not. Her throat itched slightly, and she could only breathe through one of her nostrils.

She decided to figure things out one thing at a time. First, she determined that she was on her side, her right side. She guessed this from the short, sharp pain that ran through her right leg and right shoulder when she tried to move them and the solid feel of the ground on her right. With her left hand, she attempted to brush away whatever was poking her back, but she could not reach all the way around over the top, and a solid, if dusty, floor prevented her from pulling her arm around her front and under her torso to reach that way.

She tried to stand, but her right arm would not cooperate, and she fell back into the dust.

She next tried opening her eyes to see if it was dark or light out or if she was indoors or out. Her first attempt met with failure—something hot about the area around her burned even hotter as soon as she tried to look at it, forcing her to clamp her eyes shut once again and to rub them as best she could with her left hand.

So much for the question of whether or not she was awake.

Listening told her nothing about where she was. All she could hear at the moment was a humming sound, very faint and almost not there at all, probably from a fluorescent light. Indoors or night, she told herself.

Her stomach rumbled. Indoors or night, and hungry, she told herself.

As her mind cleared itself, as she became more and more awake, Samsara tried again to open her eyes, and again she was met with resistance. Something about where she was would not let her see anything without taking a toll through a burning sensation in her eyes, her cheeks, and even her mouth, and even then, she could not see anything. For the time being, she decided to find other ways to learn about where she was.

It occurred to her that her entire right side was not working properly, so she brushed at the ground in front of her—dusty, it was, with rocks or gravel or somesuch covering it, and it was itself probably paved—with her free hand, and then she tried rolling over onto her other side. Pins and needles shot through her body as she did so, exposing the skin on her right arm and part of her right leg to the air for the first time in he knew not how long. Her joints ached, but they still seemed to work. Where a rock had been digging at her side, she now felt a stab as the open wound hit the air, but it felt like it was small enough she could deal with it later.

Feeing returned to her right hand, slowly and steadily, as she took some of the pressure off of her right shoulder. She brushed it against her left hand, feeling tiny rocks falling off from their spots embedded in her palm, dust spilling into the air and tickling her nose, and a sticky substance attaching itself to her clean hand.

Samsara groaned, partly out of soreness, partly out of relief, and partly out of confusion.

She kicked with her left leg. Aside from a mild creak from using a limb that had lain dormant for several hours, nothing was amiss about it. Her right leg seemed to work, too. When she found herself in enough command of her arms to brush them up and down her legs searching for scrapes, punctures, or worse, she did so. The flesh from below her shorts to the top of her boots had suffered a few minor scrapes, nothing more, but brushing her right hand along her back resulted in the hand being covered in more of the sticky substance, but thicker and more obviously liquid.

It took her a full minute, but she managed to swing herself around so that her back hovered an inch or two over the ground, supported by both arms and both legs, and then she pressed as hard as she could until she could shove herself into a squatting position. From there, she stood up.

Something hit her on the left side of her waist: her satchel. The man at the door had not taken it from her. Why had he not? Thinking back to the moment of her capture told her nothing except that she had been led away by the police, stunned by their weapons and falling into unconsciousness, shackled, trapped, beaten.

Shackled.

But there was nothing on her wrists now. No restraints. Although she could not see them, she could move her arms as freely as she wanted, separately. She could feel her head and her knee at the same time. Did the man remove her restraints before throwing her into a jail cell?

Throwing her into a cell for murder. Of her best friend. Samsara suddenly wished her thoughts had remained muddied and unclear, and she dropped down to her knees again. She tried to cry, but doing so only made her head hurt.

Standing up again, she felt her blood run hot with anger, suddenly and violently. She hated the man who had arrested her. She hated the man who killed Jinling. She hated that voice speaking over the police radio. She hated the reporter for EpicNews. Without thinking about what she was doing, she dug her hand into her satchel in search of her hammer, and to her surprise, she found it.

The surprise was enough to shake her back into control of her actions. Why would she be allowed to keep such a thing in prison? It made no sense. She had means of self defense, she had her bag of possessions, she had... she had her radio!

Fitting around her head and over her ear, she could feel her headset, the speaker, the operation switch and tuning dials, the battery pack... everything. She quickly turned it on, resulting in a wave of static bursting into her ear. Adjustments to the volume and tuning knobs improved this, and soon she found herself listening to a broadcast of a Ralph Vaughan Williams romance, The Lark Ascending, a soothing piece that made her feel as if she were floating. Almost immediately, she relaxed.

The violin solo line still running through her ears, feeling like a loving hand stroking her back and reassuring her about life, Samsara felt some of the tension drain away; the muscles in her legs loosened, the tightness just below her forehead subsided slightly but not completely, and her arms drooped naturally to her sides, her left arm settling into her satchel and onto her hammer.

It still bothered her that she could not see, and moreso, it bothered her that she did not know why she could not see. As far as she could tell, there was nothing in front of her face, and certainly no bright light to blind her if she tried to look at it. It was possible that there was something wrong with the air around her, and she needed some sort of protection for her eyes before she could look around freely. To this end, she retrieved her goggles from her bag and slipped them over her head.

She tried opening her eyes again. To her delight, this time she felt no pain. Still, she could see nothing. Nothing at all. No white light. No heat. No fluorescence. Nothing. Just black.

Samsara switched off her radio and listened once again to see if she could tell if there was anything else around her at all. Again, though, nothing she heard nothing but humming. No sounds of a police station. No sounds of other prisoners.

Something must have happened between the laboratory and the police station. Clearly, she had not been locked up, at least not in the local jail. She wished she could find some sign of where she was, but her her usual senses did not help her at all. She could see nothing, she could hear little, and she smelled only the usual smells of a city.

Her next idea was to walk around to see how far she could go and if she could find anything. Anything at all, helpful or not, though even something unhelpful would tell her something about where she was, so it would still be, in that sense, helpful. She took this project a step at a time, always feeling ahead of her with her feet, still covered in her heavy boots, lest she step on a broken glass container or off a ledge. For all she knew, she was on top of a building somewhere, and without the ability to see where she was going, lack of caution could cause her to fall.

After about ten steps, she heard something.

At first it was nothing but a light scraping noise, off in the distance behind her, but it came nearer and nearer. She could pick out what might have been feet hitting the pavement (she was sure it was pavement at this point) and scattering some of the gravel as they went. It could have been a light vehicle, though nothing machine powered. Whatever it was, it made no noises other than those necessary for movement as it approached.

Samara's heart beat faster, and she gripped her hammer with two sweaty hands.

When the sound was about twenty feet away, the scraping stopped, and a whooshing sound replaced it. Samsara's reflexes kicked in, and she swung her hammer in the direction of the noise, more slowly than she would have liked. With a sickening crack, the hammer made contact with something large; the impact changed its momentum just enough to knock it off of a collision course with Samara's upper torso and neck. The crack was followed by a loud growl like that of a dog.

A scraping and sliding noise indicated that her assailant had slid off to the side. Samsara took a step backwards and readied her hammer in case of another charge.

"Behind you," came a voice in her headset.

Samsara's body went stiff with fright for a second, but something inside of her told her to take the warning seriously. Spinning around again, she heard a second crack as her hammer hit another lunging animal, followed by another growl, softer this time, and then a pant and a whimper as the creature sulked away, deprived of its meal.

Only a moment passed before Samsara spoke into the darkness, addressing the voice.

Of all the questions she had in her mind, she chose to ask, "Where are you?"

No answer came.

"Please," she said. "I don't even know where I am, and something just tried to kill me. Can you tell me anything?"

"I will tell you what I can," said the same voice as before. Soft and feminine, medium pitch, solid, confident, like that of a voice giving instructions to passengers on a train. Trustworthy, Samsara was not so sure.

"Anything, thank you," said Samsara, her own voice raspy and tired but more optimistic than it would have been a minute earlier.

Samsara stood still for a minute, waiting. She adjusted her goggles. She tapped her headset with her finger.

Then, "Anything?" This time, the voice on her headset was different: slightly high for a masculine voice, tinny, dripping with an emotion somewhere between confidence and delight, threatening, just a bit hoarse.

"Do you want to hear how you are going to end up dead, just like your friend?" said the new voice. "I would know that better than anyone."

Samsara trembled and bit her lip. Around her, in all directions about fifteen feet away, she could hear the same scraping, stepping sounds made by the attacking animals, moving nearer and nearer, until all of them, at the same time, stopped.


	30. The Athena Machine

Chapter 29 – The Athena Machine

Rapid, light footfalls marked Chrono's passage over the bride linking the north and south ends of the desert province, not once abating to check the progress of the hungry mob of Nu creatures behind him feasting on the dead from the battlefield. The bridge stretched from the fortress over a wide, deep chasm through which ran the Yellow River many hundreds of yards below, smooth, calm, and reflective like a plate of glass installed at the floor of a canyon, a lonely crack nestled in the center of a desolate world peeping through to the other side as if offering a porthole to someplace more lively.

Nothing lay on the other side of the river; no roads or buildings or signs of life interrupted endless miles of sand and rock and wind extending beyond the horizon in three directions, untouched by what civilization even this land could boast. What evidence of life there might have been in the past had shriveled and died under the merciless desert sun, its bones bleached and then buried by the onslaught of the waves of sand propelled in a slow march by centuries of wind; it was a place where even death was unwelcome, signs of its presence swept under the rug until they finally disappeared, forever.

The last sign of life, of death, of anything, then ,was the tower in the middle of the bridge, rising from the glossy depths of the water below up through the masonry of the bridge itself and extending upwards, a stony hand reaching for heaven in supplication, grasping at the last hope of avoiding the sea of nothingness beyond the far riverbank. Around the tower, the gloomy yellow of the dusty air yielded for a dull red glow emanating from the tower itself. Its appearance was familiar even to Chrono.

When he reached it, he found himself stopping to catch his breath.

Paem joined Chrono. "This is where we hide," she informed him. "The western arm of the Himmelkreuz. The Yellow Tower. If we use the metaphor of it being a fountain of knowledge, in this place it becomes an oasis. Whatever we call it, the Nus cannot come inside."

The same lock as before responded in the same way to the same motion of Paem's staff; she held it in front of her, a flash of red light erupted from its tip, and with a monstrous creaking sound, the stone doors at the foot of the tower swung open, the party stepped inside, and the doors closed behind them with a crash, sealing out the light and the threat of the ravenous Nus. Paem dispelled the resulting darkness with a tap of her staff against the floor that triggered a system of lamps embedded in the walls to switch on and bathe the room in pale red, the center of the room and exits enjoying more light than the corners.

Paem led Chrono and Coppelia to one of the dark corners and rapped on the wall with her staff, and then a stone slab slid aside, revealing a winding stairwell leading both up and down.

Coppelia tapped Paem on the shoulder. "Is it not correct that we will now ask the Himmelkreuz supercomputer of the whereabouts of Miss Orchid? If the ability of the computer to predict the future is limited, it may still be of use if Miss Orchid is somewhere amidst the carnage outside."

Paem began descending the stairs, but Coppelia caught her arm before she made three steps. "Miss Paem," she said, "we went upwards on our previous visit to a Himmelkreuz tower. Should we not take the same route this time?"

"These towers are similar," Paem answered, "but they are not the same. Here, we need to go down."

Down they went. Down a flight of stairs, and then ten flights, and then what seemed like hundreds, Chrono, Coppelia, and Paem climbed down and down and down, the stairs never changing, the wall around the stairwell never changing, the light from the walls never changing, and nobody speaking until long after the door through which they entered the stairwell disappeared above them.

The low visibility and limited room to maneuver left Chrono feeling somewhat vulnerable, so he refused to allow himself to relax as he followed Paem farther and farther into the pit. His pace steady, he made sure he kept his breath deep and slow as he went, not letting his nerves get the better of him. Still, he found his hand straying to the hilt of his sword now and then.

His grip on the sword tightened when he heard a rattling noise. Looking behind him, he saw nothing directly, but out of the corner of his eye he though he caught a glimpse of a rock falling down the middle of the stairwell shaft. He pointed this out to Paem.

She stopped briefly and sniffed the air, but then she continued. "Just a rat," she said matter-of-factly.

Their descent continued as before for a short time, but it was interrupted again by another noise, this one a whistling sound that seemed to come from above them, approaching quickly. It passed through the same trajectory as the rock, falling straight down the middle of the shaft. This time, Chrono stared directly at it as it passed, the high pitch of the noise flipping to something much lower as it passed them.

Although he caught only a split second glance at the falling object, Chrono thought it looked vaguely humanoid. He turned his gaze to Paem, but she shrugged and continued walking.

"Just a rat," she repeated.

No other noises or sights broke the monotony of the rest of the trip down the stairs, but Chrono noticed that Coppelia had shifted to her left, placing her farther out along the radius of a cross section of the well as they followed the stairs in a clockwise circle downward.

The bottom of the long stairwell held no surprises. The stairs hit a stone floor in a small, round room with a door at one side. The endless circling had destroyed Chrono's sense of direction, so he had no idea in which compass direction the door faced; he could only follow as Paem opened it the same way she opened all doors in Himmelkreuz towers.

The other side of the door led to a hallway with a low, arched ceiling and walls that curved first left and then right, putting a strict limit on how far ahead Chrono could see and blocking much of the available light. Familiar red lights still shone through the walls in places, but each stretch of the hallway was only exposed to the nearby lights because of the twists and turns, unlike in the stairwell, where nothing obstructed light from traveling down the central shaft. As a result, this stretch of the path was much, much darker than any before it.

At the end of the winding road there was another door, and beyond that, a large, well-lit room.

Chrono found himself somewhat surprised that there was light in the room that was not red, but what surprised him more was the machine in the middle of the floor: a bulky, metal contraption brimming with wires and tubes and blue glowing buttons and viewscreens and keyboards and a padded chair in the center and a glass shell in the back housing an extremely large chunk of glowing Dreamstone.

The chair in the center had restraints on its arms and, above it, a metal cap with wire protruding from its top and running into the body of the machine behind it. Paem sat here, fastening the restraints on her left arm and pulling the cap onto her head and announcing, "This is where I will get my answered."

"Answers to what?" said Chrono.

"Every question that concerns us now," said Paem. "Orchid, the invasion, everything. This machine can help us."

"It is different from the mechanism used before," said Coppelia. "Yet, it still uses Dreamstone."

"Correct," said Paem. "The North Tower operates through spinning rings lining its towers, which are lined with Dreamstone. It can read the rings with a beam of light and then move the wisdom to a receptacle more easily read. This one, obviously, works differently. I will demonstrate this Athena Machine for you."

Paem slid her free arm down at her side and pulled a switch jutting out from the side of the chair, and the machine's lights began to flicker, its tubes hissed, and a humming sound spread from the glass shell.

"Ask me a question, Chrono!" Paem shouted over the racket. "Anything you want to know about me!"

Chrono thought for a second and then yelled back, "Where were you born?"

Paem smiled, clearly pleased with the question. "I was born in this land, though not in the Western Province," she said.

As she said it, the machine hummed louder, the Dreamstone glowed slightly brighter, and a panel of blue lights lit up on the side.

"See?" she said. "It can confirm the truth of what I said. The Dreamstone here is different from the Dreamstone in the North, but it works in much the same way. It can search what it knows about me and confirm what I want to find out from it. In this test, I have it telling me something I already know to confirm the truth. Easy, isn't it?"

"Indeed," said Coppelia. "This might be able to tell us where Miss Orchid is."

"You won't know until you try," said Paem. She pushed the cap off her head, slipped her left arm out of the restrain, and hopped down out of the chair.

"Ah," said commented while waving her arms cheerfully, "being around the Athena Machine makes me feel young and refreshed!"

"But you're still hungry," Chrono muttered to himself.

"What?" said Paem. "I didn't hear you."

"N-nothing," said Chrono. "Just a thought I had. Nothing important."

"If you say so," said Paem.

"I am ready," said Coppelia, who had already sat in the chair. She motioned for Paem to cue the machine's startup procedure. Paem fastened the cap to Coppelia's head, pressed a button on top of the cap, and flipped the same switch as before, and the machine whirred to life once more.

"Tell me, Coppelia," she said, "why you are searching for Orchid."

"It is my duty," said Coppelia. "That is all I can say for now."

The machine hummed loudly and glowed blue. Paem looked looked over at the lighting panel and then back at Coppelia.

"Do you believe she is nearby now?" she asked.

"I do believe as you say," said Coppelia. "At the least, I believe it is possible, and if it is possible, then I must do everything in my power to find her."

The Athena Machine let out a raucous grinding noise, and the lighting panel flashed red.

"The machine says that you are mistaken," said Paem. "It usually knows best, so maybe the rumors of your Orchid being here were false."

"It would appear so." Coppelia sounded extremely disappointed.

"Please," said Paem, "step out of the machine so we can test Chrono. Maybe it can glean something from a search of his past, present, and future."

A sullen Coppelia detached her arm restraints, slid out of the chair, and trudged over to Paem's side. She watched as Chrono took his turn in the chair. Once again, Paem helped him with the arm restrains, attached the metal cap, hit a button on the cap, and flipped a switch at the side of the machine, and once again, it came to life.

"Are you the Hero of Time?" Paem asked before Chrono could even get comfortable.

"I suppose so," said Chrono. "I don't like thinking of myself as such, but it's something I hear from time to time from Nadia and Lucca and some others. I guess so, then."

The machine's response was one of blue light and humming, not red light and clanking. The content of the question and the suddenness with which Paem asked it left Chrono slightly dazed, but the relief at getting the less noisy response from the machine comforted him somewhat for some reason. He gulped in a deep breath before Paem could volley another question at him.

Paem giggled slightly at his discomfort. "I apologize for being pushy, Chrono," she said. "I just needed to get the question in which you were in the right state of mind to answer it. It's my job, you know. I have to find things out, and it's actually very important to Lord Kuei to confirm that you actually are the Hero of Time. It's not like there aren't counterfeits out there, as well as other heroes. You're not the first to get yourself lost here without dying first, you know."

"So I'm not dead! I knew it," said Chrono, and the machine jolted him with a flash of red and a clank.

"I'm... what?" said Chrono, confused by the response and more than a little frightened.

"It's reacting to your statement of belief," said Paem. "You said you knew it, but that was most likely false. Most people who wind up here have no idea if they are dead or not, and the machine read your certainty as false."

"I see, so I'm not dead," said Chrono, and the blue light resumed. An extremely pleasant feeling welled up in his chest, as he at least had at least one answer to one small question about his journey. Whatever else happened, he was certain that he was not dead, which made sense, as he could not remember dying.

Paem notice his change of countenance and smiled at him. "This should be relaxing for you. So, let's try something else. You're here to find someone named Nadia, right?"

"Yes," said Chrono. "I am searching for her. More than anything, I want to find her again. I was taken from her in the middle of our wedding ceremony, though I have yet to find out why."

Throughout Chrono's answer, the Athena Machine hummed happily and shone blue.

"You've never met Crow or his minions before?" asked Paem.

"Of course not," said Chrono. "I mean, I never met them before we encountered them at the tower."

The Athena Machine continued to hum.

"And you met Coppelia in a cave north of the home of Lord Kuei, correct?"

"Yes," said Chrono. "I met here while we were both lost in the Jinling Caverns."

More blue from the machine confirmed Chrono's answer.

"Do you think there is any chance of finding your Nadia here, or do you really want a chance to find your way home?"

"I would like to go home. I doubt Nadia would be here, though I have certainly seen stranger things. Nothing here makes complete sense to me."

"The Athena Machine agrees with you. I should like to know what could be stranger than finding your lost love in the lost land Beyond Time, but if that were impossible, the machine would have told me. Curious."

"The universe is a funny place," said Chrono, "and at times I can't help but think I was meant to see some of the funniest sides of it."

"That I believe," said Paem. "The perspective on history for those here is a bit broad. I envy those like you who can see so many major events up close. But enough of that. I need to find out more. We haven't really learned anything other than that Coppelia's Orchid is not here. I've confirmed a couple of interesting facts, but nothing that you two did not already know."

Paem tuned away for a minute, her attention on the Athena Machine's panels of buttons and switches and assorted other control devices that remained untouched, and as if pondering further uses for the machine, she walked to one of the larger control panels, tapped it in a few places, and turned back to Chrono.

"Think of Nadia for a minute," she said. "Think as clearly as you can of exactly what enters your mind when you imagine her name. Then look at the far wall."

The lights dimmed. Then they all went out, including those on the walls. The only remaining light came from the Dreamstone in the back of the machine, and even it dimmed as the glass surrounding it turned opaque. Then the wall on the far side of the room lit up, solid and blue, from a beam of light projected from the top of the Athena Machine.

Chrono stared at the light, momentarily forgetting to think of Nadia. Once he shifted his thoughts to his beloved, he saw her, not just in his mind, but on the far wall. He saw her in a long, white dress, with lacy sleeves puffed above her shoulders, a silk band about the middle, and the finest an ornately sewn copy of the royal crest of Guardia adorning the side, almost too small to be seen by anyone who did not know it was there. Chrono should not have known of this had he kept to the tradition of avoiding the bride before the beginning of the wedding, but as with so many other traditions, he and Nadia had ignored it in favor of a a fully costumed pre-wedding trip around the world in the Wings of Time, which Lucca had never gotten around to dismantling.

Chrono stared at the face of the image in front of him, at the tiny, perfect nose in the middle, the huge, deep, innocent eyes into which he had found himself lost the first time he saw them at the grounds of the Millennial Fair, before he even knew the name Marle, much less Nadia. He stared at her eyebrows, a strange thing for many to notice, but a feature he had long admired on her face. He watched her hair, tied up for the sake of formality but frayed in places, reminding him of the rebellious force of life deep within Nadia's personality, overriding formality whenever necessary He thought of her beautiful mouth, the same mouth out of which came the most sonorous voice he had ever encountered, a voice the mere memory of which could lull him to sleep at night, easing his mind even in the most dangerous of situations. Below that, her chin, sharp and bony and young, and then her neck, curved and smooth, like that of a swan. Below her neck, he saw her pendant hanging on her necklace, the artifact that set off that set off his very first adventure. Seeing it in front of him instead of just in his mind left him with a longing deep inside, a desire to be home with his love, a desire so strong he almost burst out of the hand restraints and ran over to the wall, though he knew if he did so, the image would vanish.

The image then changed. The formal dress vanished, replaced by her light blue casual outfit, the one she had worn when he first saw her. In fact, everything in the image became as things were when Chrono first met Nadia. The plain blue background turned into the lush, colorful marketplace with the vendors selling food and candy, the drinking contest booth, the man with the lost lunch, the clearing to the side where Gato battled fairgoers for Silver Points, the ominous Telepod in the back, and of course, the pendant itself falling onto the ground as Chrono and Nadia collided. On the screen, Chrono helped Nadia up and made sure she was okay, then he helped her locate her pendant. Once they found it, she suggested he show her around the Millennial Fair, and there began the most important relationship Chrono would ever have. Right there on the screen, he saw his reason for living, the person who kept him going in the worst of times and kept him grounded in the best of times: Nadia, his love that had endured death, his love that could survive the End of Time and the end of the world, everything from the trials of the Masamune to the final battle with Lavos, his love that continued even in the Darkness Beyond Time.

Chrono's eyes grew watery.

And with a loud crash, the glass behind him, the glass housing the chunk of Dreamstone, shattered into a thousand pieces, and the demons Pain and Passion leaped into the middle of the room in between Chrono and his friends.


	31. Exchange

Chapter 30 – Exchange

"You do not even know where you are, do you?"

Samsara strained her ears to hear the voice in her headset, now the original voice, the nicer one. She shook her head in answer to the question.

"You do know that you are surrounded, correct? A circle. Do as I say and you will survive."

Thinking this over, Samsara concluded that she had little choice but to trust the voice; she was practically unarmed (one hammer against a pack of invisible monsters?), disoriented, and blind, so what else was there? Steeling up her courage, she nodded and whispered to herself that she wanted to know how to procede.

"Walk forward," said the voice.

She did, until she could feel the warm breath of the monster in front of her pressing against the skin on her neck. Thinking about how it was tall enough to breathe on her neck, as opposed to her knees, made her shiver.

"When I say so, run in a circle to your right," commanded the voice. "Run all the way around, and do it three times. I am counting. Ready... now!"

Samsara darted to her right. A rush of air pushed against her, and a snapping noise exploded behind her like the sound of a bear trap clamping shut. She could both feel and smell another monster still to her left as she ran, and then another and another, all the way around the circle. Her head spun until she nearly forgot where she started. In fact, she lost her sense of space and direction, but throughout she remembered to count how many monsters she passed, and she counted in sets of three. Since the voice had told her to make the circuit three times, the total number of monster snaps would be a multiple of three when she finished. Thirty-six: there were three monsters for every quarter circle, she had concluded before losing her bearings, and so she continued, blind, frightened, and lost, yet able to count, and the counting would allow her to follow her instructions. If the voice in her head had not lied, then the counting would save her.

Instinct made her turn ninety degrees to the right upon completing her third time around and the thirty-seventh set of jaws attempted to maul her, and when she reached the center of the circle again, she heard the voice, the nice one, in her ear: "Excellent. The monsters expect prey in the center of their circle not to approach the perimeter. You have confounded their expectations while completing your objective."

For a brief moment that felt much longer, nothing happened. No sound came from the headset speaker or from the circle of predators or from Samsara herself.

Then, from the speaker: "Ipso facto, meeny moe, MAGICO!"

"What?" Samsara wondered.

"You are now fortified with magic. Do you wish to try it out?"

Samsara said nothing, but something inside of her moved. It was something mysterious and foreign to her, but at the same time, it felt familiar. Reliable. Powerful, like a parent watching over a child sleeping in a bed at night. A warm night. She felt the salty sea breeze fade as her mother closed the window and drew the curtains, blotting out the moonlight and the sound of crickets and the leaves rustling in the trees outside. Her cradle grew warm, then hot, then unbearably hot. The air around her crackled and simmered, and, memories shattered, Samsara drew her legs together, leaned on her toes, and pulled her arms across her chest, her chin pointed defiantly skyward.

With a whoosh and a rumbling whistle, the air around Samsara grew hotter still until it could bear no more heat, and then it exploded outward from her in a ring, scorching her skin, making her eyes water, and choking her breath away, and compared to the monsters around her, she was at ease.

All at once the monsters cried out in pain, very briefly, some moaning, some barking, and some turning to run, but then they all fell silent. The paws scratching the ground, the barking and growling, and even the breathing stopped.

"Do you feel as if you are in an oven?" asked the voice. "That is natural the first time. You may feel discomfort, but you will grow accustomed to the discomfort, and you yourself will come to no harm when you invoke your new power."

"My power?" Samsara did not quite understand.

"I misspoke," said the voice, "but it is still your power. Allow it to be your ally in this dark world."

"You know where I am, then? I thought I was going to jail."

"You are where you need to be," said the voice. "I, too, am where I need to be right now, and my task will be to guide you until you can once again move on your own."

"How did I get here?" Samsara asked the question at the top of the heap of questions piled in the center of her mind at the moment.

"You came the same way I did," the voice answered. "Someone holding great animosity for you cast you into the void in an effort to rid himself of you while leaving no trace of you behind. It is what you might call the perfect murder."

"Then I'm... dead?"

"I do not know," said the voice. "Furthermore, I do not know how I could determine one way or the other. What I do know is that, whatever one might label your life's status right now, you are able to move and think, and that should be enough to act on the world and perhaps enough to save it, yourself, and others whose lives are important to you. Perhaps mine is also important to you, or yours to me, and that is why I am able to help you now."

"Why help me? I don't even recognize you."

"If you could see," said the voice, "you might, or you might not. Most likely you would not."

"That's another thing," said Samsara. "Why can't I see anything? Is there nothing to see here?"

"There is plenty," said the voice. "However, I am afraid you may have lost your sense of sight when you lost your eyes."

"When I..." Samsara paused. The words sank in.

"I lost my what?" An intense ache flooded Samsara's head, almost as if it had already been there, but she had ignored it to the point where it had ceased to exist, and then thinking about it brought it back.

"I did not see it happen," said the voice, "but when you arrived here, despite the advanced sight enhancement apparatus attached to your face, you had no eyes, and eyes are what enable us to see."

"You mean you could not see my eyes, right?" Samsara's voice was now full of worry.

"Now is not an optimal time to concern yourself with such a small matter. If you do things correctly, you should find your eyes again before this is all over. In the meantime, however, for your sake and mine, you must find your way out of here, find the one you sent you here, and find a way to bring me with you. As long as I am here, I lack the means to fulfill my duties in my world, as you lack the means to fulfill your own."

"I get it," said Samsara. "We were both thrown into this void, and there is nothing we can do about anything else until we find a way out. I'll never know what happened to Jinling Lan, to Jin, and I"ll never have revenge on the man who hurt her. Killed her, I mean. I mean, I know what happened to her, but I don't know why or how, and I don't know what to do about it, and..." Her voice cracked.

"Miss Lan," the voice repeated. "Your duty is to find her?"

"To find her killer," said Samsara. "She was murdered, and the police think I did it."

"That makes little sense. I can guess from your tone that you and Miss Lan were close enough to be friends, and thus I find it hard to believe that any competent police force interested in justice would suspect you of her murder."

"They do. They arrested me. Knocked me out, and I woke up here."

"Please allow me to illustrate your predicament with a fable," said the voice. "If you can, imagine three blind men and an elephant. Each blind man wishes to know the true nature of the elephant, and yet each overgeneralizes from small, non-representative parts of the elephant. One reaches the conclusion that the elephant is like a tree; this he believes because he feels the elephant's legs, which are round and stout like tree trunks. Another supposed the elephant to be like a kite; this conclusion he reaches through feeling the elephants ears. The third decides that the elephant is like a snake; he so thinks because he feels the elephant's trunk. You, on the other hand, conclude that the police believe you to be a killer merely because your firsthand experience has you arrested, but it is quite possible that something else entirely is afoot, and you have only begun to discover the true nature of the events now unfolding."

"And you know?" Samsara asked pointedly.

"I do not," said the voice. "I only know how to reason from the facts given to me. Anything beyond it outside of my ken."

"Excellent," said Samsara. "I'm alone, I cannot see, I do not know where I am, I know only a fraction of what is going on, and I have a voice in my head that doesn't know anything more than I do. Tell me, are you at a radio station now? Just who are you?"

"I am but a voice," it answered. "I do not know my true nature, but I may be like the elephant in the story. From a certain point of view, I may be like another person, from another I may be like a friend, and from yet another, I may be nothing more than a dream in your head, a dream trapped in there your entire life, escaping only to be locked in a new prison in this world, this Darkness Beyond Time."

"I really have lost it. I really have. There went the last of my sanity. I can't really be lost... wait, the Darkness Beyond Time?"

"I said as much."

And then, through all of the pain and confusion and everything else pushing her emotions in just about every other direction, Samsara felt that familiar burst of triumph well up inside, just like every time she discovered a solution to a problem. It was her favorite feeling, and she allowed herself a smile, a smile she felt she quite richly deserved.

"I'm going to get us both out of this," she said, "and if we are really lucky, and my suspicions are correct, I think I might even be able to save Jin."

"Is this the same Jinling Lan yous said was murdered?"

"That's the one."

XXX

The same Jinling Lan, in fact, faced a problem quite similar to the Samsara's, but she faced it alone in the middle of a vast desert next to the wreckage of the _Golden Days_.

She found herself lying on her back in the middle of a mound of sand outside of the ship. Without even thinking about what she was doing, she rubbed her hand over a lump on the right side of her head. Her mouth was dry from the desert air, and when she licked her lips to soften them, she tasted a cuprous paste spread over the top, probably a relic of her broken nose. The last thing she remembered was a fight with a man in the laboratory, after which she was dragged, consciousness rapidly fading, into the _Golden Days_.

Filling in the pieces between what she remembered and what she now saw, Jinling concluded that she had crashed somewhere, and if her assailant had come with her on the timeship journey, he had left her for dead in the middle of the desert, nothing to be seen for miles and miles in any direction.

At least, she thought, the _Golden Days_ did not explode when operated. Unlike the prototype.

Where in time was she, though? The ship's instrument panel might have an answer for her, if it had survived the crash in any readable form, so she crawled through the broken side door and onto the bridge, where she kicked aside piles of shattered glass and scanned the panels at the front of the room for the dial she wanted. The Linear Temporal Destination Display, or LTD, though its face was cracked and its needle bent, clearly pointed to the setting at the extreme clockwise end of the dial, the End of Time. The moldy orange sky and actual terrain outside indicated that she was not, in fact, at the End of Time, or at least that where she was in no way resembled the End of Time she had read about in so many books and so many reports by Balthasar himself. Clearly, then, she had not just jumped to a distant location on the linear timeline.

This, then, meant that all the research she had done with Samsara had led to a conclusion that was right: there was something else out there, and they had figured out how to get there. And now, with her ship in desperate need of repairs and her supplies limited to whatever she could find in the ship's tiny kitchen, she had every reason explore this new uncharted territory. She'd finally found it, so now it was time to discover just what she'd found.


End file.
